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 blonde, 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.
