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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
"Rankine's interior world is often suffocating."
"an incisive, anguished, and very frank call for Americans of all races to cultivate their 'empathetic imagination' in order to build a better future."
"Rankine is vulnerable, too."
"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 ..."
"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 ..."
"Rankine once again opens a literary window into the Black experience, for those willing to look in."
"These images and asides expand on the essays while offering a glimpse into Rankine's process as a writer ..."
"Rankine is at her most generous, empathic and radical, seeking to open up a dialogue beneath the veneer of easy language ..."
"In Just Us, Rankine the poet becomes an anthropologist."
"while that might sound like a criticism, Rankine's theoretical ambivalence helps Just Us enact its central tension: between reason and reality, between our notions of justice and who we are."
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