Poet Claudia Rankine and dog Sammy at her home, September 26, 2014. She recounts interactions she had when traveling first-class that are similar to what Wilkerson remarked upon in her book Caste. At one point, Rankine writes, “From Appalachia to Fifth Avenue, my precarity is not a reality shared.” That’s incontestable. 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. Excerpt from Citizen, An American Lyric, a book-length prose poem by Claudia Rankine The new therapist specializes in trauma counseling. Vincent Acovino helped with engineering. 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. 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. Though she likes to work in the gray area between objective understanding and subjective experience, she’s an authoritative writer; even her self-doubt registers her command. “The thing that brought both my husband and me to the gymnasium,” she writes as they visit her … 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. From chatting with strangers on airplanes, to recounting moments in her classroom, … To disagree publicly, accepting that censure might come? 1 Votes C. Related. 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. Who calls? While narrative drives most chapters, the book insists on contemplation. 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. 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. Her friend refused to go up on stage when asked, in an attempt to draw attention to the class divide in the theatre. In the book, Rankine has conversations about race with friends and strangers—and learns about herself in the process. 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. 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. Ricardo DeAratanha/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images 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. I saw the question marks, of course. Born in Kingston, Jamaica, poet Claudia Rankine earned a BA at Williams College and an MFA at Columbia University. Poet Claudia Rankine on Just Us and Unearthing the Raw Truths of Anti-Black Racism. Through photographs, illustrations and side-by-side page notes, we can consider the weight of … And it seeks out not only understanding, but the ways in which that understanding might emerge. Claudia Rankine gives a poet’s insight into the nature of conversation in white America. 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 … 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? Who names? Poet Claudia Rankine and dog Sammy at her home, September 26, 2014. Both imagine and engage their audiences in such complex networks that even to disagree is to enter more deeply, becoming more aware of our own impulses, seeing more clearly what she’s describing and—although it might take took a long time to admit it—what she asks. 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. For example, in her discussion of young Black women who dye their hair blond, she writes: “Either blondness grants access to something we feel we don’t have, or it feels like a random choice.” It’s hard to imagine the women would recognize themselves here; for many, surely, it’s a camping of whiteness, claiming control over race and turning it into a form of play. I wanted her to own her action and not cower. But I suspect it had a lot to do with me, too: I felt chastised. Some disagreements don’t work. On top of that, Rankine treats experience as a text in which each act demands interpretation and implies a legible impulse. She spoke to us earlier this year about her book "Just Us." I’m a privileged white male, and the unnamed subjects in those opening questions are also the frequent subjects of the book itself—privileged white people. 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. That’s what’s interesting about Just Us. Claudia Rankine’s Just Us: An American Conversation is an incredibly accessible work. In addition, Rankine struggles to move with the same clarity outside of a white/black dichotomy. 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. 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. Her house has a side gate that leads to a back entrance she uses for patients. “Claudia Rankine’s Citizen comes at you like doom,” wrote Hilton Als. Which is both to ask very little of Rankine’s readers, and to ask everything of us. 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. 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. You have only ever spoken on the phone. 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. 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. People like me. Get a year in your mailbox for only $48 →, Beverly Rogers, Carol C. Harter Black Mountain Institute. On the left, Rankine includes notes, fact checks, images, other texts. 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. 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. What does it mean to listen—to really listen—and, sometimes, to disagree? They do what important art often does: they create new ways of moving—ways that feel, in this case, for me, like compensation for the fluency I forfeit along the way. “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. Watch an … 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.”. It was a humorless moment and so proved my point. But even amid my initial misreading and resistance, Just Us compelled me. 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. Amid those failures, a few moments jut out as images of hope and models of connection. Or, me. CORNISH: Claudia Rankine, recent MacArthur Genius winner. These phrases—white fragility, white defensiveness, white appropriation—have a habit of standing in for the complicated mess of a true conversation. And, in a slightly different vein, her writing sometimes feels confined by the narrow range of terms in which she seeks more resonance than she’s able to generate. I don’t want to minimize any of these objections. Sign up for The Believer’s mailing list and get free essays, comics, interviews, and more, right in your inbox. I felt reproached. She served as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 2013 to 2018. 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). 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. Rankine asks, invites, or insists that the white people around her acknowledge the centrality of race in their apparently innocent lives. But within those parameters, I think—and I think Rankine suggests this, too—we need to be present enough to diverge. 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. • Just Us by Claudia Rankine is published by Allen Lane (£25). The work of antiracism is partly an effort to interrupt that fluency, to show people the ground on which they walk and convince them to walk differently, self-consciously, there. At times, her habit of close-reading experience causes her to miss out on lived possibilities. “The poet Erica Hunt describes love as ‘a close reading’ that ‘help[s] me invent myself more—in the future,’” she writes. 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. If anything, the dreams are deferred, as Langston Hughes told 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 … For example, a poem made up of lines like “The gloom is // the off-white of white. Verbs dominate the poem, but they’re typically deployed as other parts of speech (”a call”) or shifted into the passive voice (“is named”). It combines her poetry and essays that lend itself to dialogue while reading the book AND after reading the book. “Nobody notices, only you've known, you're not sick, not crazy, not angry, not sad-- It's just this, you're … This episode was originally produced by Andrea Gutierrez and edited by Jordana Hochman. It’s one of several letters from friends and acquaintances that unlock an impasse in Just Us, which seems fitting. 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. “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). 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. As Ta-Nehisi Coates explained when Andrew Sullivan tried to argue about Black IQ, “Being forced to debate your humanity” is absurd. 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. “Us,” like the “conversation” of its subtitle, and like the “lyric” of the first two (or, for that matter, like founding declaration of the United States) is a reminder of what mostly isn’t there. Just Us invites and rewards attention. 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. 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. Usually you are nestled under blankets and the house is empty. Just Us is full of questions—runs of questions, questions revising earlier questions, questions about questions people ask. 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. Up to a point, that feels meaningful—Rankine seems at times to be modeling the ways one might operate outside of fluency as she expands to think about Latinx- and Asian-Americans. 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. 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 … Imagining that uprooting economic inequality will eliminate racism underestimates racism. I’m not sure Just Us makes good on everything those first two books promised. Rankine ends Just Us holding out more hope than I’d expected: The murkiness as we exist alongside each other calls us forward. And I do think Rankine gets some important things wrong. Part of that, I’m sure, is a result of Rankine’s style. 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 it's one of the over 350 books you can browse for all … Its main text only appears on right-hand pages. This September, decorated poet, certified genius, and former Pomona College professor, Claudia Rankine released her highly anticipated Just Us: An American Conversation (Graywolf, 2020). No subject—no human actor—attaches to them. Sometimes the moon is missing and beyond the windows the low, gray ceiling seems approachable. Laughter is another aspiration here, an image of shared, embodied presence. 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. 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. 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.”. 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. Red dots in the main text point back to the left, so that you move two steps forward and one step back. 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. The illustrious author, poet, and playwright, Claudia Rankine, joins us with the release of her latest book, Just Us: An American Conversation. Claudia Rankine: Just Us. 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