Just Us: An American Conversation

Just Us: An American Conversation (2020) is a nonfiction essay collection by the poet, playwright, and critic Claudia Rankine. It was a finalist for the 2021 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction. Rankine is the author of six previous books, including The White Card: A Play (2019) and Citizen: An American Lyric (2014), the work for which she is best known. Citizen was a 2014 nominee for the National Book Award and the winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry in 2015. For the latter award, it was the first work ever to be nominated in the categories of both poetry and criticism.

In 2020, Rankine was ready to premiere her play Help, a work based on her essay, “I Wanted to Know What White Men Thought About Their Privilege. So I Asked.” The essay was published in the New York Times on July 17, 2019 and appears here in the chapter “liminal spaces i.” The play, set to open at the Manhattan-based arts venue, The Shed, was canceled due to the outbreak of COVID-19. Rankine is the co-founder of the Racial Imaginary Institute, a MacArthur Fellow, and the Frederick Iseman Professor of Poetry at Yale University.

Summary

For Just Us: An American Conversation, Claudia Rankine integrates photography, poetry, social media posts, historical texts, and statistical research to help readers understand how structural racism—that is, the ways in which white supremacy predetermines social, political, and economic conditions for non-whites—impacts her daily life. Her stories are personal but inherently political, as each essay examines the ways in which she navigates through airports, dinner party conversations, teacher-parent conferences, and conversations with white friends as a Black woman and, thus, as someone who has not been afforded the freedoms and privileges that, she contends, white people blithely enjoy at the expense of people of color.

Rankine takes the subject of white privilege, which may seem abstract, particularly to white people, and contextualizes it in mundane occurrences. Using her own advantages as an educated and upper middle-class person, which give her access to business-class lounges and Ivy League classrooms, she probes a collective psyche to learn more about racial hierarchies in the United States. However, Rankine’s analysis is not untouched by racial phenomena outside of the United States. One of her conversations about white privilege occurs on a flight home from Johannesburg. Rankine thinks about that country’s history of apartheid in relation to that of the United States’ legacy of Jim Crow. Additionally, she explores the ways in which other people of color have distanced themselves from Blackness, including her consideration of a racist Chinese ad. Racism may be a Western phenomenon, and one that is explicitly responsible for the construction of the United States, but the impacts of colonialism and globalization have exported white supremacist standards to many shores.

Unable to combat the impact of white supremacy on the psyche, even on those of people of color who have internalized racism, Rankine’s purpose with this book is simply to ask questions, to engage, and to find places in which subjects, both white and people of color, can connect.