Home › Books › Just Us: An American Conversation
Just Us: An American Conversation
by
74/99
Critics' Rating Index
86/99
Readers' Rating Index
96/99
Scholars' Citation Index
98/99
Volume of Reviews
70/99
Volume of Reader Ratings
Sign in to add to your shelf, rate, or review this book.
About This Book
Claudia Rankine's Citizen changed the conversation--Just Us urges all of us into itAs everyday white supremacy becomes increasingly vocalized with no clear answers at hand, how best might we approach one another? Claudia Rankine, without telling us what to do, urges us to begin the discussions that might open pathways through this divisive and stuck moment in American history. Just Us is an invitation to discover what it takes to stay in the room together, even and especially in breaching the silence, guilt, and violence that follow direct addresses of whiteness. Rankine's questions disrupt the false comfort of our culture's liminal and private spaces--the airport, the theater, the dinner party, the voting booth--where neutrality and politeness live on the surface of differing commitments, beliefs, and prejudices as our public and private lives intersect. This brilliant arrangement of essays, poems, and images includes the voices and rebuttals of others: white men in first class responding to, and with, their white male privilege; a friend's explanation of her infuriating behavior at a play; and women confronting the political currency of dying their hair blond, all running alongside fact-checked notes and commentary that complements Rankine's own text, complicating notions of authority and who gets the last word. Sometimes wry, often vulnerable, and always prescient, Just Us is Rankine's most intimate work, less interested in being right than in being true, being together.
Reviews
"Her commitment to the emancipatory possibilities of conversation can, at times, make Just Us a frustrating read ..."
"an interrogation, constantly unwinding a spiral of questions ..."
"Read each exacting page as closely as a poem, and it will read you."
"In language all the more devastating for its simplicity, Rankine analyzes the overwhelming power of whiteness in everyday interactions ..."
"As a study of what it's like to operate within society's limits, Just Us is exactly the mixed triumph that Rankine has permitted herself to hope for."
"Just Us is an indictment but it is also a longing for conversation, and Rankine examines deeply personal struggles of navigating her own prejudices ..."
"Rankine writes with disarming intimacy and searing honesty about pointed exchanges with White friends and colleagues, fissures within her marriage, and encounters with White strangers who assume some sort of superiority of rank ..."
"On one hand, Rankine looks to theory in order to explain the workings of whiteness in the world ..."
"Claudia Rankine may be the most human human I've ever encountered."
"The race-educational genre to which Just Us makes a contribution can only do so much to domesticate the wild strangeness of race, which is the experiential mode of the strangeness of history ..."
Preview
Reader Reviews
0 reviewsSign in to write a review.
No reader reviews yet. Be the first!