Poet Claudia Rankine and dog Sammy at her home, September 26, 2014. In the first two books, the obstacles to freedom were a major part of the shape Rankine gave to her materials; she scored the American Lyricsagainst the lyricism they were most often denied. Describing a moment with her husband, she writes: This white man who has spent the past twenty-five years in the world alongside me believes he understands and recognizes his own privilege. And yet, I feel obligated to say, my thinking about how to best understand—and articulate—these disagreements is inseparable from the experience of reading Rankine’s An American trilogy. I saw the question marks, of course. Red dots in the main text point back to the left, so that you move two steps forward and one step back. It’s by far the longest of the three, but it also feels smaller in scope and less agile in its reach. Just Us: An American Conversation by Claudia Rankine. Because white can’t know // what white knows” both exposes the limitations of the terms it uses and fails to achieve (at least for me) the kind of surprise that Rankine seeks. In Just Us, Claudia Rankine provides a blueprint for how we talk about and experience race in America. Amid those failures, a few moments jut out as images of hope and models of connection. Just Us focuses primarily on the places of economic privilege where Rankine lives and moves, and yet she doesn’t say much about class outside the realm of her own affluent circles. “Claudia Rankine’s Citizen comes at you like doom,” wrote Hilton Als. And it’s the meticulous care of a writer, rather than the loose freedoms of face-to-face conversation, that gives the book its form and force. They compose a network in which each thread activates the whole, and where moving back a page I also seem to be moving deeper in. Claudia Rankine: Just Us. 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 … On top of that, Rankine treats experience as a text in which each act demands interpretation and implies a legible impulse. Claudia Rankine is an American poet, essayist and the editor of several anthologies. What other inane things have I said?” Rankine responds with “Only that,” “And just like that, we broke open our conversation—random, ordinary, exhausting, and full of longing to exist in some image of less segregated spaces.”. Among the many potential privileges of whiteness, of those of us Rankine asks this of, is fluency—the ability, for example, to say what you think without thinking, in the confidence that you are good, and your goodness sufficient. Some disagreements don’t work. Ricardo DeAratanha/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images Poet Claudia Rankine and dog Sammy at her home, September 26, 2014. “It’s the most workable definition I’ve found to date.” Most confounding for Rankine, and so most charged, are situations in which others refuse to engage. It combines her poetry and essays that lend itself to dialogue while reading the book AND after reading the book. She pulls dramatic tension from those moments, documenting both her own sometimes-awkward, occasionally timid, often-vulnerable attempts to force the issue and the resistance she encounters, first within herself, and then among the white people she tries to engage, most of whom fall back on one of the many available scripts—so familiar that we can read them without even realizing they’re scripts—for keeping race from knocking the familiar business of life off course. “Fantasies cost lives,” Claudia Rankine writes in her new book, “Just Us,” a collection of essays and poems (and accompanying data graphs, photos, … Verbs dominate the poem, but they’re typically deployed as other parts of speech (”a call”) or shifted into the passive voice (“is named”). Part of that, I’m sure, is a result of Rankine’s style. https://www.newyorker.com/.../the-misspent-insights-of-claudia-rankines-just-us You can follow us on Twitter @NPRItsBeenAMin and email us at samsanders@npr.org. One could imagine a concluding volume that either moved with more freedom—that would feel more spontaneous, more lyrical, more capable of imagining and embodying joy and anger—or one that went deeper into the human bodies, including the less privileged ones that were more prominent in Citizen, that American unfreedom continues to break. I want to honor Rankine’s invitation, to imagine what it would mean to go beyond the scripts that stand in “for the complicated mess of a true conversation.” The hardest part, for me, is thinking through disagreement (hence my waiting this long). I’m especially invested in this trilogy in part, I suspect, because the last two books make that lack of fluency meaningful. Yes, you are. I wanted her to own her action and not cower. Ricardo DeAratanha/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images, See It's Been a Minute with Sam Sanders sponsors and promo codes. “The poet Erica Hunt describes love as ‘a close reading’ that ‘help[s] me invent myself more—in the future,’” she writes. Listen as she and Amanda examine the emotions underpinning white privilege, shine a light on racial inequality in its less obvious forms, and explain what it actually means when a white person, “doesn’t see color.”. And describing how they ended up in marriage counseling after her cancer remitted, she explains: I sat in a speeding car, and because metaphors can also be realities, speedily informed my husband that, in my remaining time, though always the time remains unknown, I needed to find a partner who would make me laugh. Laughter is another aspiration here, an image of shared, embodied presence. Rankine later sends him the chapter describing their encounter, and he responds with a letter unearthing a memory of racism from his high school years, which he’d misrepresented on the plane. I don’t say that to minimize my failure (or, at least, not for that reason alone), but to describe one of the reasons Just Us and Citizen work so well. Poet Claudia Rankine reads from Citizen=, her recent meditation on race in America. This is my life, these conversations. Claudia Rankine Claudia Rankine is the author of Citizen: An American Lyric and four previous books, including Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric.Her work has appeared recently in the Guardian, The New York Times Book Review, The New York Times Magazine, and the Washington Post.She is a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, the winner of the 2014 Jackson Poetry … From chatting with strangers on airplanes, to recounting moments in her classroom, … “Nobody notices, only you've known, you're not sick, not crazy, not angry, not sad-- It's just this, you're … And while she’s retained the variety of Citizen—its magpie materials and techniques—they less often feel like a product of necessity this time around, gathered up in an urgency they therefore reflect, and more like a pastiche. On the left, Rankine includes notes, fact checks, images, other texts. For example, a poem made up of lines like “The gloom is // the off-white of white. Certainly he knows the right terminology to use, even when these agreed upon terms prevent us from stumbling into moments of real recognition. Rankine responds, “Am I being silenced?,” and then into the ensuing silence she writes, “I wanted this white woman to look me in the eye and say, Yes. Rankine read an excerpt from Just Us which explored a visit to the theatre with a white friend and a dissection of their uncomfortable behaviour during the performance. The illustrious author, poet, and playwright, Claudia Rankine, joins us with the release of her latest book, Just Us: An American Conversation. Poet Claudia Rankine on Just Us and Unearthing the Raw Truths of Anti-Black Racism. • Just Us by Claudia Rankine is published by Allen Lane (£25). Rankine asks, invites, or insists that the white people around her acknowledge the centrality of race in their apparently innocent lives. She served as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 2013 to 2018. She recounts interactions she had when traveling first-class that are similar to what Wilkerson remarked upon in her book Caste. There’s a quality of vigilance that spills into the relationships and conversations she describes. But neither do I feel like I can claim my response as separable from the imaginary conversation I’ve been having for years with the trilogy that Just Us concludes. While narrative drives most chapters, the book insists on contemplation. The sole exception, the pronoun “one,” stands out in its almost-inhuman formality, wondering how to speak, surrounded by actors “one” can’t or won’t identify. But listening without the possibility of disagreement isn’t listening; it’s patronizing—hiding from the possibility of reproach, and from the person who might reproach me. Greywolf/AP Its main text only appears on right-hand pages. From chatting with strangers on airplanes, to recounting moments in her classroom, … But I overlooked them, too, treating them as rhetorical or forgetting about their frequency as I went on. An Amazon Best Book of September 2020: Like her award-winning Citizen, Claudia Rankine’s Just Us is comprised of short vignettes, photos, excerpts from textbooks, tweets, historical documents, poems, and her own experiences as a Black woman, which serve to unravel the reality of the racism that runs rampant in our country. (University of Georgia Press) 7 Rave • 2 Positive. Through photographs, illustrations and side-by-side page notes, we can consider the weight of … More questions break loose inside these queries. It was a humorless moment and so proved my point. While she does, for example, address the impacts of racial disparities in generational wealth, she concentrates on the disparities between her and a white friend who owns a house as nice as hers. What does it mean to listen—to really listen—and, sometimes, to disagree? Pronouns matter immensely in Rankine’s An American… trilogy, which Just Us concludes. “If you’re looking for justice, that’s just what you’ll find—just us.”—Richard Pryor Rankine continues the conversation about racism and white privilege that she began with her book, Citizen: An American Lyric (National Book Award Finalist for Poetry in 2014). Just Us is full of questions—runs of questions, questions revising earlier questions, questions about questions people ask. She writes of attending the play Fairview—at the end of which a Black member of the cast asks white members of the audience to leave their seats and come on stage—with a white friend who does not get up. Claudia Rankine’s Just Us: An American Conversation begins with a poem composed mostly of questions, starting with these: What does it mean to wantan age-old callfor changenot to changeand yet, also,to feel bulliedby the call to change?How is a call to change named shame,named penance, named chastisement?How does one saywhat ifwithout reproach? During one dinner party, a white woman cuts her off, apparently uncomfortable with Rankine’s talk of racism, by calling attention to the dessert tray. Format: 352 pp., hardcover; Size: 6.52” x 9.16”; Price: $30; Publisher: Graywolf; Recurring Chapter Title: “Liminal Spaces”; Some of the Items That Appear Alongside the Main Text: graphs, fact checks, pictures of Tweets, pictures of historical events, screen grabs, a picture of Emily Dickinson, an excerpt from a speech by Audre Lorde, quotations from news reports, pictures of blond hair and blond women, a picture of a PowerPoint slide from a diversity workshop, a picture of a page from Nelson Mandela’s calendar; Number of Erasures: two; Number of Those Erasures That Refashion an Earlier Part of the Text: one; Paper: thick and glossy; Representative Passage: “To converse is to risk the unraveling of the said and the unsaid.”. At times, her habit of close-reading experience causes her to miss out on lived possibilities. As an excerpt from a speech on anger, guilt, racism, and women by Audre Lorde runs without commentary on the left-hand pages, Rankine’s confusion and frustration with her friend escalates, and her questions speed up, as if scrambling for some purchase, some steady ground. In a recent interview with Audie Cornish of NPR, Rankine explained that she rarely has conversations with white men “exploring a subject without a destination,” and it may be that that ideal of conversation as aimless is part of what leaves this book feeling less complete. Reading page seventy-three, you return to seventy-two for additional notes, then move on to page seventy-five, which directs you back to the images on page seventy-four. She sat down and wrote.” It’s not everyone’s ideal of love or friendship, but at least for those of us who cherish close reading, it’s often engrossing to read. At one point, Rankine writes, “From Appalachia to Fifth Avenue, my precarity is not a reality shared.” That’s incontestable. 1 Votes C. Related. The first-person plural surrounds Rankine’s “I,” and she goes out of her way to mark its inclusiveness, inviting in anyone willing to join her. I’m not sure Just Us makes good on everything those first two books promised. At times, in Just Us, Rankine articulates an ambition that seems simple yet remains out of reach. The first volume, Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric, was a book of “I,” while the second, Citizen (also An American Lyric), concentrated on “you.” As the title suggests, this third book imagines a synthesis, but it’s mostly thwarted. I missed that my first time through, which seems remarkable: They’re everywhere. Excerpt from Citizen, An American Lyric, a book-length prose poem by Claudia Rankine The new therapist specializes in trauma counseling. If anything, the dreams are deferred, as Langston Hughes told Who calls? hide caption. In the book, Rankine has conversations about race with friends and strangers—and learns about herself in the process. No subject—no human actor—attaches to them. Who names? But even amid my initial misreading and resistance, Just Us compelled me. Or, me. I felt reproached. That’s what’s interesting about Just Us. Claudia Rankine’s Just Us: An American Conversation is an incredibly accessible work. She spoke to us earlier this year about her book "Just Us." This September, decorated poet, certified genius, and former Pomona College professor, Claudia Rankine released her highly anticipated Just Us: An American Conversation (Graywolf, 2020). Get a year in your mailbox for only $48 →, Beverly Rogers, Carol C. Harter Black Mountain Institute. After a year that offered many moments of reflection—from the coronavirus pandemic, to protests for racial justice, to the long election season—acclaimed poet Claudia Rankine's latest book offers a framework to process it all. As the subtitle indicates, Just Us is an extended, open-ended conversation.The text asks us what conversation can do, what work must be done to even arrive at the point where we can honestly speak … Her house has a side gate that leads to a back entrance she uses for patients. Imagining that uprooting economic inequality will eliminate racism underestimates racism. All we need to do is to recognize an American potential for—and ongoing history of—terror, violence, injustice, whiteness, innocence: the worst of us. And it seeks out not only understanding, but the ways in which that understanding might emerge. But to talk about elite racism without delving into class, including, for example, the poverty of white people (not to mention people of color) in Appalachia, risks reprising the dynamic that formed whiteness—a cordoning off of African Americans from poor whites, whose suffering is different in nature and causes, but whose lost potential for common cause is a source of our inability to systematically address poverty and racism. And it's one of the over 350 books you can browse for all … I don’t want to minimize any of these objections. Finally, the story cracks open, once again with a letter: “And then she did something I didn’t expect but that explains why we are friends. But there are other kinds of precarity, too, and many of them are a function of the world that produces first-class cabins, fancy dinner parties, and Ivy-League schools. But I suspect it had a lot to do with me, too: I felt chastised. Usually you are nestled under blankets and the house is empty. But Just Us, with its lack of a destination, with its frequent approach of “what if,” sometimes lacks the charge of either of those—or of some other destination that might stand in their place. People like me. And, Rankine suggests, a conversation that denies racism is effectively the same: It’s impossible to truly listen to a person and deny either their worth or suffering. A promising conversation on an airplane runs aground when the white man she’s talking with claims “I don’t see color,” which, Rankine writes, “pulled an emergency brake in my brain.” But, when corrected, he replies, “I get it. But Just Us, with its lack of a destination, with its frequent approach of “what if,” sometimes lacks the charge of either of those—or of some other destination that might stand in their place. But that doesn’t prevent her from twice offering up a friend’s condescending take that “Latinx and Asian people are the ‘junior partners’ in a white nationalist administration” as something worthy of consideration. On this episode of "Literary Arts: The Archive Project," poet Claudia Rankine discusses her latest collection, "Just Us," with Jericho Brown in this conversation from the 2020 Portland Book Festival. Sometimes the moon is missing and beyond the windows the low, gray ceiling seems approachable. Watch an … These phrases—white fragility, white defensiveness, white appropriation—have a habit of standing in for the complicated mess of a true conversation. I would have liked her then.” It’s a surprising claim—and a measure of just how exhausted she is by the ways her anger, her sanity, her life, is foreclosed. Rankine ends Just Us holding out more hope than I’d expected: The murkiness as we exist alongside each other calls us forward. As Ta-Nehisi Coates explained when Andrew Sullivan tried to argue about Black IQ, “Being forced to debate your humanity” is absurd. But within those parameters, I think—and I think Rankine suggests this, too—we need to be present enough to diverge. And so my response proved Rankine’s point—even though the point of the book isn’t, at least not in the way I first thought, to make a point. That book is called Just Us: An American Conversation, and in this episode, we revisit her chat with NPR's Audie Cornish, co-host of All Things Considered and host of the podcast Consider This. There is again the vulnerability of Don’t Let Me Be Lonely, but less of its precision in rendering her own emotions, its boring down into Rankine’s heart. A special bonus episode, recorded live at On Air Fest on March 8, 2020 (just before social distancing sent everyone home), featuring a crowded room of lovely human beings enjoying an immersive live performance of The Paris Review Podcast.The show opens with excerpts of Toni Morrison’s 1993 Art of Fiction Interview, scored live by some of the musicians that created the score for Seasons 1 and 2. “The thing that brought both my husband and me to the gymnasium,” she writes as they visit her daughter’s mostly white school, “is the knowledge that though the deep-seated racist systems are reaffirmed and the evidence is there for us to see, I still want the world for my daughter that is more than this world, a world that has our daughter already in it.” That wanting, that hunger for life and honesty and the surprise of recognition, the surprise of change, change here, animates Just Us at its best, and it’s in that aspiration that the book most often achieves the vitality of conversation, the ongoingness that is its own image of hope (keep talking) even as it describes this world and all that it destroys. 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