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An American Conversation
by Claudia Rankine
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 blond, 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.
"Rankine writes with disarming intimacy and searing honesty...Throughout this potent book, the author ably conveys the urgency of the stakes regarding race in America...A work that should move, challenge, and transform every reader who encounters it." - Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"[A] unique and powerful meditation on the challenges of communicating across the racial divide in America...an incisive, anguished, and very frank call for Americans of all races to cultivate their 'empathetic imagination' in order to build a better future." - Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Rankine presents another arresting blend of essays and images, perfectly attuned to this long-overdue moment of racial reckoning...[Analyzing] the overwhelming power of whiteness in everyday interaction...Rankine once again opens a literary window into the Black experience, for those willing to look in." - Booklist (starred review)
"Rankine seeks to find a space beyond white defensiveness and guilt where meaningful discussions can take place...A must-read to add to the conversation on racism, antiracism, and white fragility." - Library Journal (starred review)
"This brilliant and multi-layered work by Claudia Rankine is a call, a bid, an insistent, rightly impatient demand for a public conversation on whiteness...A rare honesty toward a potential affirmation. Anyone who turns away from this bold and vital invitation to get to work would be a damn fool." - Judith Butler
"In my work, well-meaning white people consistently ask me how to recognize racism. Yet we might ask, 'How have we managed not to know?' The information is everywhere, if we care to listen. Indeed, here is illuminating testimony that is both poetic and well beyond the abstract. With clarity and grace, Claudia Rankine delivers a gut punch to white denial. Just Us is stunning work―audacious, revelatory, devastating." - Robin DiAngelo
"With Just Us, Claudia Rankine offers further proof that she is one of our essential thinkers about race, difference, politics, and the United States of America. Written with humility and humor, criticism and compassion, Just Us asks difficult questions and begins necessary conversations." - Viet Thanh Nguyen
"Fiercely intimate, rigorous...[Just Us] lets all of us in on the conversations―with others and the self―that are necessary for survival, which, attested by this all-too-human account, is rooted in the vigilance that racially imagined people must maintain for their very being." - Nuar Alsadir
This information about Just Us was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Claudia Rankine is a poet, essayist, and playwright. Just Us completes her groundbreaking trilogy, following Don't Let Me Be Lonely and Citizen. She is a MacArthur Fellow and teaches at Yale University.
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