Claudia Rankine

At home and in government, contemporary America finds itself riven by a culture war in which aggression and defensiveness alike are on the rise. It is not alone. In such partisan conditions, how can humans best approach one another across our differences? Taking the study of whiteness and white supremacy as a guiding light, Claudia Rankine explores a series of real encounters with friends and strangers - each disrupting the false comfort of spaces where our public and private lives intersect, like the airport, the theatre, the dinner party and the voting booth - and urges us to enter into the conversations which could offer the only humane pathways through this moment of division. Just Us is an invitation to discover what it takes to stay in the room together, and to breach the silence, guilt and violence that surround whiteness. Brilliantly arranging essays, images and poems along with the voices and rebuttals of others, it counterpoints Rankine's own text with facing-page notes and commentary, and closes with a bravura study of women confronting the political and cultural implications of dyeing their hair blonde. Wry, vulnerable and prescient, this is Rankine's most intimate work, less interested in being right than in being true, and being together.

An American Conversation

Just Us

Marion

This idea that racism is solely a dynamic of youth and ignorance seems its own form of American optimism. 

Knowing that my silence is active in the room, I stay silent because I want to make a point of that silence. Among white people, black people are allowed to talk about their precarious lives, but they are not allowed to implicate the present company in that precariousness. They are not allowed to point out its causes. 

To converse is to risk the unraveling of the said and the unsaid.

To converse is to risk the performance of what's held by the silence.

I wonder if my new friend sees our developing friendship as a burden, given that, to share herself, she has to give me the tools to know her. How do I account for my own ignorance?

I have watched white people reduce black people not to a single black person but to a single imagined black person, imagined animal, imagined thing, imagined ignoramus, imagined depravity, imagined criminality. imagined aggressor, superpredator,

poverty queen, imagined baby maker, imagined inferior being in need of everything belonging to white people including air and water while stealing everything belonging to white people including air and water and on and on toward an imagined no one,

 All this wouldn't matter if this same category of white people • weren't strategizing tests, writing exams, grading exams, funding schools, granting bank loans, selling property, making laws, suppressing voters, determining sentences, evaluating pain, teaching classes, creating and perpetuating master narratives, hiring, firing, demoting, killing imagined me.

Just Us quotes

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