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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
"She is one of our foremost thinkers, and Just Us is essential reading in 2020 and beyond."
"It becomes a circulating ethos of willful ignorance, the right to live a life whose fundamental assumptions go unobserved ..."
"Just as indecision is the superficial appearance of a decision that you are not yet ready to own, Rankine's ever-present uncertainty is a defense against unbearable certainties, against a white indifference ..."
"The book pierces the abstraction of whiteness as Rankine confronts it in real, fraught physical spaces—airports, schools and suburban neighbourhoods via emergency calls to 911 operators — by asking simple, devastating questions ..."
"Claudia Rankine may be the most human human I've ever encountered."
"Rankine's commitment to conversation as the threshold of political transformation is rooted in a deep investment in the possibility of rewiring the social contract, the unspoken agreement about civility that is also a formative democratic principle ..."
"The book returns often to the phrase "what if," but it feels besieged by "what is": unfreedom is the point, as is a shift in the "American conversation" from hope to a kind of dignified resignation ..."
"what is radical about Just Us is the range of Rankine's empathy, which refuses dismissal in favour of conversation, rooting into the substrata of thought that exists behind everyday racism ..."
"Rankine's representation of loneliness was always political as well as personal ..."
"[A] unique and powerful meditation on the challenges of communicating across the racial divide in America ..."
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