Just Us: An American Conversation

Now in paperback, Claudia Rankine’s “skyscraper in the literature on racism” (Christian Science Monitor)

In Just Us, Claudia Rankine invites us into a necessary conversation about Whiteness in America. What would it take for us to breach the silence, guilt, and violence that arise from addressing Whiteness for what it is? What are the consequences if we keep avoiding this conversation? What might it look like if we step into it? “I learned early that being right pales next to staying in the room,” she writes.

This brilliant assembly of essays, poems, documents, and images disrupts 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 deflect true engagement in our shared problems. Rankine makes unprecedented art out of the actual voices and rebuttals of others: White men responding to, and with, their White male privilege; a friend clarifying her unexpected behavior at a play; and women on the street expressing the political currency of dyeing their hair blond, all running alongside fact-checked notes and commentary that complement Rankine’s own text, complicating notions of authority and who gets the last word. Funny, vulnerable, and prescient, Just Us is Rankine’s most intimate and urgent book, a crucial call to challenge our vexed reality.

"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

"This brilliant and multilayered work by Claudia Rankine is a call, a bid, an insistent, rightly impatient demand for a public conversation on whiteness.  In a time when shameless and unbridled racism takes its most vivid form as the voice of the state, Just Us offers a way to think and feel in the midst of ordinary life drenched in the history of racism and moves with tenacity, critical patience, and a rare honesty toward a potential affirmation.  It is a shock to see how, sustained in poetry and prose, acute thought forms in the midst of continuing history of systemic violence and injury.  Anyone who turns away from this bold and vital invitation to get to work would be a damn fool."-Judith Butler

"As she did in her acclaimed 2014 collection Citizen, Rankine here combines essays, poetry and visual art to interrogate the ways race haunts her imagination, and America's."- The New York Times Book Review, 100 Notable Books of 2020

"In my work, well-meanign 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

"A brilliant and timely examination of whiteness in America.  This consciousness- raising, bravura combination of personal essays, poems, photographs, and cultural commentary works on so many levels and is a skyscraper in the literature on racism."-The Christian Science Monitor

"With an arresting blend of essay and images that's perfectly attuned to this long overdue moment of racial reckoning.  Rankine analyzes the overwhelming power of whiteness in everyday interactions.  Touching on Beyonce, blondes, skin lightening, and the inherent tensions in her own interracial marriage, Rankind once again opens a literary window into the Black experience."-Finalist citation for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction.