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.
