Just Us
by Claudia Rankine

Reviewed by Katherine Preston

---

Published: April 12, 2021

---

These first lines of Claudia Rankine's Just Us: An American Conversation ask the book's grounding question: if white Americans really want to change, why haven't they? Are we willing to change, or are we only willing to call, or even simply hear calls, for change? Rankine wants to know, "what if" white Americans could set aside their personal investments in whiteness to recognize and engage differently with her, a Black woman, as she seeks "a new sentence in response to all my questions." What if white Americans could actually listen to Rankine's questions and hear her when she says, "I am here"?

Similar to the style of Rankine's previous books, Just Us collects documentary images, memories of conversations, some poetry, and much reflective prose. While Rankine has always incorporated an array of source material into her work, Just Us stands out partly for its extensive, explicit citations in sections called "Notes and Sources" and "Fact Checks" that appear on nearly every left-side page of the book. These citations appear under a copy of text from the opposite page that corresponds to the information cited. In juxtaposition with evidentiary statistics, images, quotes, and studies on the left, the right-side pages reproduce the speaker's conversations with others and herself in casual, reflective language. Photographs spanning both pages or multiple pages occasionally disrupt this format, and occasionally the left page is left blank. The book is almost sociological and less poetic than Rankine's previous works, though Rankine mediates the sociological through reflections on personal experiences.

Just Us reflects its speaker's longing for a way to be together with the white people in her life in a way that isn't strained by systemic racism—"just us." While the book dreams this condition for a not-yet-constituted "us," it also recognizes the same idea to be the present delusion of many white people in the United States—that the US really is just us, isn't systemically racist, is fair and just. Just Us shows this ahistorical, only seemingly apolitical, fantasy of a racially unmarked "just us" to be part of a white racial imaginary ("racial imaginary" is Rankine's term for imagination inflected and limited by racial thinking, as elaborated in her The Racial Imaginary: Writers on Race in the Life of the Mind). Consistent with her previous work, Rankine lingers in, expands, and here seeks out moments when disavowed racism nevertheless and so often subconsciously slips out from the white racial imaginary. She hopes that these rupturing moments of interpersonal racism might be transformed into moments of productive recognition and understanding. Refusing the repression of persistent racism that is so deeply American, Just Us attempts a working through of white racial delusions as they spill across the 360 pages of Just Us.

Just Us completes a trilogy with Rankine's previous books Don't Let Me Be Lonely and Citizen. But this last book deviates substantially from the other two books, most basically in its subtitle An American Conversation in contrast to the subtitling of both other books as An American Lyric. Rankine's lyrics, Don't Let Me Be Lonely and Citizen, deliberately play with genre expectations for a singular and stable speaker-persona and poetically disrupt normal patterns of interpersonal racialization. Both of these books reach toward something like a condition of just being in language. But in Just Us, Rankine writes near-explicitly as herself and clearly identifies most of her other speakers. Just Us is more consistent with Rankine's recent pivot in her play The White Card to focus more exclusively on whiteness, particularly in its expression in conversations between white and Black people.

This book lingers on Rankine's questions of how to engage a white imaginary and combat the willful white forgetting of racist history and fact. The work is explicitly investigative of the functions of whiteness and feels deliberately educational. Rankine is transparent about the connection between Just Us and the course—"Constructions of Whiteness"—that she teaches at Yale University. Divided into 21 sections, the tome could be digested in segments like a class. Each section meditates on a manifestation of American racism, often through recollections of Rankine's attempts to break through racialized social norms to ask white strangers and acquaintances directly about their attitudes toward racism and perceptions of whiteness. Several of these anecdotes recount Rankine's experiences of being perceived as out of place on first class flights and at elite dinners. Rankine also shares experiences in her personal relationships, recounting conversations with friends and even her husband marked by racialized misunderstandings. She accumulates communicative failures and partial successes. Though Rankine takes pains to pose these questions in non-threatening, indirect ways, this strategy nevertheless often results in shut-downs and dead-ends as her audience does or doesn't catch her drift.

The book is in many ways Rankine's least intimate, perhaps in its attempt to discourage counterproductive white guilt or the spectacularization of Black suffering, two concerns made evident in The White Card. Yet the persistent, explicit citations in Just Us suggest an anxiety that the text on the right-side pages – the text in Rankine's voice – won't be believed on its own. These citations are also telling in the way that they appeal to a particular white, educated, liberal reader skeptical of racism's scope and systematicity but receptive to academic information—the company in which Rankine currently finds herself. Ironically, the book's citations enact the problematic that it also identifies, that “the black person is asked to leave to vacate to prove to validate to confirm to authorize to legalize their right to be. . . .”

Since Don't Let Me Be Lonely, Rankine has been consistently interested in the capacity for her poetry to create a meeting ground. She writes, "perhaps words are like rooms; they have to make room for people." She wants her readers to realize "You are here. She is here. They are here. Here is here. We live here too." By slowing down and isolating moments of interpersonal racism while flooding us with facts, Rankine hopes her readers, in the place of her failed interlocuters, will confront reality and recognize it as shared, if not perceptually so. By inviting them into her personal thoughts and sometimes mulling more ambiguous questions of racism's functioning, Rankine also creates some latitude for her readers to recognize their perceptions as particular, not always shared or in common. Ultimately, Rankine seems to hope Just Us can create a space for her readers to notice what they so often miss—most basically that there is in fact another person here.

Does Just US succeed in building that ground or space? The book ironically evinces precisely a lack of shared ground, this persistent misrecognition. The logic of Just Us then must be that the exposure of misrecognition can produce a grounding recognition. But Just Us also shows us that this misrecognition happens not only at the level of interpersonal differences, but at the conceptual level of humanity. Many of Rankine's examples demonstrate the dehumanization of Blackness and thereby expose the common concept of the American human as implicitly white. If antiblackness grounds white people's sense of humanity—of both their own humanity and the humanity of any other person—racism is bound to persist even beyond discrete moments of interpersonal recognition and understanding. Rankine acknowledges this paradox of Just Us in a section of poetry, where she asks, "But who is this 'we'? / Is it even possible to form a 'we'?" I think Rankine means this question not at the level of an interracial group of friends saying "we," but rather at the level of forming a common concept of humanity. Can there be a single conceptual "we" that doesn’t exclude any actual human one?

Rankine confronts this dilemma between the interpersonal and the conceptual also through a citation of James Baldwin's essay "The White Man's Guilt," which Rankine lineates. Baldwin's writing with Rankine's lineation:

This color

seems to operate as a most disagreeable mirror,

and a great deal of energy is expended

 

in reassuring white Americans

that they do not see what they see. This is utterly

futile of course, since they do see what they see.

 

And what they see is an appallingly oppressive

and bloody history, known all over the world.

What they see is a disastrous, continuing, present

 

condition which menaces them, and for which

they bear an inescapable responsibility.

 

But since, in the main, they seem to lack the energy

to change this condition,

they would rather not be reminded of it.

Baldwin first refers to attempts to deny the "disagreeable[ness]" of Blackness to white Americans by denying their negative perceptions of Blackness via a "reassur[ance]" that Blackness is actually something positive or at least neutral. But why reassurance rather than assurance here? It is because, as Baldwin realizes, the object of the reassurance is not actually anything about Black people at all, but rather a white (mis)perception that precedes and is threatened by their confrontation with a Black person. Baldwin realizes that this reassurance is in vain because the white person's sense of disagreeableness comes not from the Blackness of the person as a person but from the white perception of Blackness as evidence of "disastrous, continuing, present" racism. The problem, according to Baldwin, is not that white people don't recognize racism—they" do see" it—but that they "lack the energy to change the condition." This passivity is perhaps not (only) due to the attendant guilt they feel (which one might also think would spur them to action), but rather because they also know or sense that they benefit from it. Baldwin's point here makes uncertain whether Rankine's accumulation of reality can move beyond generating a recognition of racism to inspiring her white readers to take responsibility for ending racism. This would require a reconceptualization of their most basic ideas, not just of Black others but of their entire world.

Just Us grapples with the possibilities and limits faced by a highly educated Black woman with access to privileged spaces willing to start a conversation about race. It offers no resolutions, only a commitment to keep asking questions. Despite her educational approach, Rankine registers doubt about the connection between antiracist education and structural change: “Is understanding change? I am not sure.” Many of Rankine's scenarios and questions feel familiar because we, and certainly she, already know them. Maybe whiteness isn't that interesting; maybe there is nothing behind its surface ignorance other than familiar racism. The book manifests the tenuousness of its attempt to engage and redirect fragile white benevolence away from masochistic shame and toward the real work of dismantling systemic racism. While this work must include both political action based in knowledge and personal, affective change, the necessary agent of that personal change remains white people themselves, not Rankine. The book ultimately calls its white readers to take responsibility for themselves and start recognizing our own position—both where we are and what we think about where "we" are—to start a new conversation about our orientations and attachments to whiteness.

---