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Just Us: An American Conversation
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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
"Liberal thought on the subject of race exerts massive energy without forward propulsion, like a spin class, producing the same realization over and over again ..."
"[A] unique and powerful meditation on the challenges of communicating across the racial divide in America ..."
"She is one of our foremost thinkers, and Just Us is essential reading in 2020 and beyond."
"But it ends abruptly, and Just Us moves on to other, more visceral topics, less suited to intricate theory work ..."
"Rankine once again opens a literary window into the Black experience, for those willing to look in."
"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 is making an appeal for real closeness."
"That Just Us concentrates on white people thinking about whiteness is not surprising, but its infrequent engagements with Black people might give the reader pause, not least for their bluntness ..."
"By chronicling her experiences as a means of bringing America's racism to the surface, she asks readers to consider those larger structures of power and violence as well as how so many of them, as individuals, have contributed to sustaining a racist society ..."
"Just Us left this white reader with the sense that I had witnessed the raising of the moral and intellectual standard."
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