Just Us: An American Conversation

Product Description
Now in paperback, Claudia Rankine’s “skyscraper in the literature on racism” (Christian Science Monitor)In Just Us, Claudia Rankine invites us into a necessary conversation about Whiteness in America. What would it take for us to breach the silence, guilt, and violence that arise from addressing Whiteness for what it is? What are the consequences if we keep avoiding this conversation? What might it look like if we step into it? “I learned early that being right pales next to staying in the room,” she writes.This brilliant assembly of essays, poems, documents, and images disrupts 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 deflect true engagement in our shared problems. Rankine makes unprecedented art out of the actual voices and rebuttals of others: White men responding to, and with, their White male privilege; a friend clarifying her unexpected behavior at a play; and women on the street expressing the political currency of dyeing their hair blond, all running alongside fact-checked notes and commentary that complement Rankine’s own text, complicating notions of authority and who gets the last word. Funny, vulnerable, and prescient, Just Us is Rankine’s most intimate and urgent book, a crucial call to challenge our vexed reality.
Amazon.com Review
Like her award-winning
Citizen, Claudia Rankine’s
Just Us is comprised of short vignettes, photos, excerpts from textbooks, tweets, historical documents, poems, and her own experiences as a Black woman, which serve to unravel the reality of the racism that runs rampant in our country. From chatting with strangers on airplanes, to recounting moments in her classroom, Rankine challenges herself, her students, and her readers to ask questions about privilege, racism, and bias, and then to listen. Throughout
Just Us, Rankine annotates her own words and thoughts, as a way of reminding the reader of her commitment to understanding the evolutionary nature of thought, identifying bias, and then addressing it. In so doing, she encourages the reader to be ever vigilante and open to conversation. Rankine’s brilliance shines through her ideas and her facility with language, but also through the construction of
Just Us, which is a truly visual and active inquiry into race. This book is catalyst for not only edification, but for participation and action.
—Al Woodworth, Amazon Book Review
About the Author
Claudia Rankine is the author of
Citizen: An American Lyric and four previous books, including
Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric. Her work has appeared recently in the
Guardian, the
New York Times Book Review, the
New York Times Magazine, and the
Washington Post. She is a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, the winner of the 2014 Jackson Poetry Prize, and a contributing editor of
Poets & Writers. She received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2016. Rankine is the Frederick Iseman Professor of Poetry at Yale University.