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A review by jeremygoodjob
Just Us: An American Conversation by Claudia Rankine
5.0
Whereas Citizen showed up and crystallized/named a network of associations around whiteness that white Americans were just beginning to acknowledge during the Obama presidency, Just Us documents white supremacy’s desperate backlash and fight for survival. What’s most compelling to me this time is the different place Rankine occupies as a vigilant, crisis-bound traveler and socializer. She spends a lot of time with white men and women, asking them about their whiteness, putting the comfort of a quiet plane ride (or even an old friendship) at stake.
Why not? I love the way the book concludes while meditating on that sentiment—Why not?—and the way she sees the phrase enabling people to move past history, while she herself relentlessly seeks it out. Every other page has some sort of fact checking, a nod to her constant, neurotic negotiation: Am I misremembering this history? Am I the crazy one in this room? No. Here’s the receipts.
The weirdest thing about the book is that it essentially ends with a footnote describing her friend’s reaction to reading the original manuscript, which Rankine then feels the need to explain (or defend) within the text the reader is looking at. It’s thematic and interesting—it is an American Conversation—but I think the ending sheds light on a shifting besieged/not besieged posture throughout the book that leaves me curious. I don’t usually finish reading something wanting to ask the writer questions, but the window Rankine gives us into her world is still somewhat obscure.
Why not? I love the way the book concludes while meditating on that sentiment—Why not?—and the way she sees the phrase enabling people to move past history, while she herself relentlessly seeks it out. Every other page has some sort of fact checking, a nod to her constant, neurotic negotiation: Am I misremembering this history? Am I the crazy one in this room? No. Here’s the receipts.
The weirdest thing about the book is that it essentially ends with a footnote describing her friend’s reaction to reading the original manuscript, which Rankine then feels the need to explain (or defend) within the text the reader is looking at. It’s thematic and interesting—it is an American Conversation—but I think the ending sheds light on a shifting besieged/not besieged posture throughout the book that leaves me curious. I don’t usually finish reading something wanting to ask the writer questions, but the window Rankine gives us into her world is still somewhat obscure.