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Just Us: An American Conversation is indeed a conversation that Claudia Rankine has with others and with herself. In this book, Rankine encourages me to have these deeper and more difficult conversations relating to race.

“You say and I say, but what
is it we are telling, what is it
we are wanting to know about here?��

This book is a patchwork of essays, data charts, social media posts, historical documents, excerpts from academic studies, poetry and much more. Her sections are laid out episodically so there is no narrative arc.

In an interview with the magazine O Rankine says that she prefers the term white living to white privilege. She defines it as "the ability to simply live your life—to walk down the street or enter your house without thinking about being stopped or shot. But it’s often misunderstood as being about economic advantage."

I want to note that one issue that I find missing in this work is conversations about socioeconomic status. Just Us focuses primarily on the places of economic privilege in which Rankine lives.

Rankine asks us all to consider how white and black lives are built upon a racial order, and to use conversation as a way to explore this question. She hopes that we can learn to speak to each other openly and honestly despite our discomfort, to get to know and to better understand each other, and perhaps in the process lose some fear and begin to trust each other so that we may be able to remove some of the structural blocks and biases that exist.

On a visit to her daughter’s mostly white school she thinks, “The thing that brought both my husband and me to the gymnasium, 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.�� In a perfect world we would all want more for all of the children.

Just Us is a great read to prompt discussion and to remind us that questioning, deep listening, vigilance, and ongoing conversations are strategies to push back against complicitness with racist structures.


This was a buddy read with Candi.