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Summary
Summary
FINALIST FOR THE 2021 ANDREW CARNEGIE MEDAL FOR EXCELLENCE IN NONFICTION
Claudia Rankine's Citizen changed the conversation-- Just Us urges all of us into it
As 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 (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
MacArthur Fellowship recipient Rankine (Citizen: An American Lyric) combines poetry, prose, and imagery in this unique and powerful meditation on the challenges of communicating across the racial divide in America. Drawing on her own experience as a Black woman married to a white man, Rankine highlights the necessity of having uncomfortable conversations in order to understand both the experiences of other people and one's own needs and beliefs. In the essay "liminal spaces i," she recounts asking a white stranger about his understanding of white male privilege after he complained that his son couldn't use "the diversity card" to gain early admission to Yale, where Rankine teaches. In another essay, she contemplates asking her mixed-race daughter's white teachers about their "unconscious inevitable racism and implicit bias" at a parent-teacher conference. "José martí" features Rankine grappling with the limits of her own knowledge as she talks with a new friend about anti-Latinx racism. The discussion hits several snags, yet Rankine persists: "I still have questions, and the way to get answers is to bear her corrections." Other pieces incorporate commentary from Rankine's conversational partners and "fact checks" of her own assertions. The result is an incisive, anguished, and very frank call for Americans of all races to cultivate their "empathetic imagination" in order to build a better future. Agent: Frances Coady, Aragi, Inc. (Sept.)
Booklist Review
Six years after her groundbreaking Citizen: An American Lyric, Rankine presents another arresting blend of essays and images, perfectly attuned to this long-overdue moment of racial reckoning. In language all the more devastating for its simplicity, Rankine analyzes the overwhelming power of whiteness in everyday interactions. Whether it's the white airline passenger who steps confidently in front of her in the first class line ("I understood my presence as an unexpected emotion for him") or a college friend who has no memory of a campus cross burning, whiteness erases Black lives and perceptions, stranding Black people in a nebulous gaslight dimension, their Blackness "a most disagreeable mirror." A white man chides the flight attendant for serving him while ignoring Rankine, yet fails to make the racial connection; Rankine wryly observes that white people can see the results of white privilege yet stubbornly refuse to acknowledge the cause. "The lack of an integrated life meant that no part of his life recognized the treatment of black people as an important disturbance. It's hard to exist and also accept my lack of existence". Touching on Beyoncé, blondness, skin lightening, and the inherent tensions in her own interracial marriage, Rankine once again opens a literary window into the Black experience, for those willing to look in.
Library Journal Review
Esteemed poet, playwright, and essayist Rankine (Frederick Iseman Professor of Poetry, Yale Univ.; The White Card) explores whiteness in a hybrid collection of essays, poetry, photographs, and documents. A frequent traveler, Rankine writes in the section "liminal spaces i" on the assumptions white businessmen make about her as a Black woman. With mixed results, she attempts to engage them in conversation about their white male privilege. "To converse is to risk the performance of what's held by the silence," she writes in "liminal spaces ii." The entire book becomes a conversation that probes and questions more than it answers. Like a conversation, it circles around, moves from one topic to another and back again. From pieces on the media whitening of tennis phenom Naomi Osaka to dyed blond hair to "Ethical Loneliness," a stunning essay interleaved with a keynote speech by Audre Lorde, Rankine seeks to find a space beyond white defensiveness and guilt where meaningful discussions can take place. VERDICT "How does one say/ what if/ without reproach?" asks Rankine, and proceeds to show us. In the end it is "just us" wanting "justice," which will require whiteness to be visible and interrogated. A must-read to add to the conversation on racism, antiracism, and white fragility.--Stefanie Hollmichel, Univ. of St. Thomas Law Lib., Minneapolis
Table of Contents
What if | p. 3 |
Liminal spaces i | p. 13 |
Evolution | p. 57 |
Lemonade | p. 71 |
Outstretched | p. 85 |
Daughter | p. 91 |
Notes on the state of whiteness | p. 107 |
Tiki torches | p. 119 |
Study on white male privilege | p. 135 |
Tall | p. 143 |
Social contract | p. 147 |
Violent | p. 159 |
Sound and fury | p. 177 |
Big little lies | p. 183 |
Ethical loneliness | p. 193 |
Liminal spaces ii | p. 217 |
José martí | p. 231 |
Boys will be boys | p. 255 |
Complicit freedoms | p. 267 |
Whitening | p. 307 |
Liminal spaces iii | p. 317 |