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A review by marireadstoomuch
Just Us: An American Conversation by Claudia Rankine
5.0
Incredible read, as expected from Rankine’s work. Thoughtful, probing, measured.
Some quotations, leaning heavily towards engagements with whiteness that stood out to me as a white person. Due to the nature of the citations as inter text, the following also includes other voices:
“The lack of an integrated life meant that no part of his life recognized the treatment of black peoples as an important disturbance. To not remember is perhaps not to feel touched by events that don’t interfere with your livelihood. This is the reality that defines white privilege no matter how much money one has or doesn’t have.”
Thinking about integration/having conversations in all-white rooms (and suggested reading Elizabeth Anderson’s The Imperative of Integration): “But if you’re white and you’re getting messages from your surroundings that reaffirms the idea that white solidarity is the way to organize your world, even while doing anti racist work, then how are you not going to believe that a constructed all-white world isn’t you at your most functioning? How isn’t that going to feel natural and right? Stark, yes. Ironic, yes.”
“If white people don’t see their whiteness, how can they speak to it? ...Does diversity not include any training to see ourselves or is it simply about addressing black grievance?”
“Understanding what is possible on the part of liberal whites means understanding that black personal achievement does not negate the continued assault of white terrorism”
“It’s harder than you would think because white people don’t really want change if it means they need to think differently than they do about who they are.”
“Among white people, black people are allowed to talk about their precarious lives, but they are not allowed to implicate the present company in that precariousness. They are not allowed to point out its causes. In ‘Sexism—a Problem with a Name,’ Sara Ahmed writes that ‘if you name the problem you’ve become the problem.’ To create discomfort by pointing out facts is seen as socially unacceptable. Let’s get over ourselves, it’s structural not personal, I want to shout at everyone, including myself.”
Sara Ahmed in “The Phenomenology of Whiteness”: “To give a problem a name can change not only how we register an event but whether we register an event. To give the problem a name can be experienced as magnifying the problem; allowing something to acquire a social and physical density by gathering up what otherwise remain scattered experiences to a tangible thing.”
“...could it be the students have divested from the performance of exceptional blackness, a performance that will never save us from the actions of ordinary whiteness...”
“The question is not really whether we’ll be tied to the somethings of our past, but whether we are courageous enough to be tied to the whole of them” -Ta-Nehisi Coates’s testimony before the House Judiciary Committee, 19 June 2019
Some quotations, leaning heavily towards engagements with whiteness that stood out to me as a white person. Due to the nature of the citations as inter text, the following also includes other voices:
“The lack of an integrated life meant that no part of his life recognized the treatment of black peoples as an important disturbance. To not remember is perhaps not to feel touched by events that don’t interfere with your livelihood. This is the reality that defines white privilege no matter how much money one has or doesn’t have.”
Thinking about integration/having conversations in all-white rooms (and suggested reading Elizabeth Anderson’s The Imperative of Integration): “But if you’re white and you’re getting messages from your surroundings that reaffirms the idea that white solidarity is the way to organize your world, even while doing anti racist work, then how are you not going to believe that a constructed all-white world isn’t you at your most functioning? How isn’t that going to feel natural and right? Stark, yes. Ironic, yes.”
“If white people don’t see their whiteness, how can they speak to it? ...Does diversity not include any training to see ourselves or is it simply about addressing black grievance?”
“Understanding what is possible on the part of liberal whites means understanding that black personal achievement does not negate the continued assault of white terrorism”
“It’s harder than you would think because white people don’t really want change if it means they need to think differently than they do about who they are.”
“Among white people, black people are allowed to talk about their precarious lives, but they are not allowed to implicate the present company in that precariousness. They are not allowed to point out its causes. In ‘Sexism—a Problem with a Name,’ Sara Ahmed writes that ‘if you name the problem you’ve become the problem.’ To create discomfort by pointing out facts is seen as socially unacceptable. Let’s get over ourselves, it’s structural not personal, I want to shout at everyone, including myself.”
Sara Ahmed in “The Phenomenology of Whiteness”: “To give a problem a name can change not only how we register an event but whether we register an event. To give the problem a name can be experienced as magnifying the problem; allowing something to acquire a social and physical density by gathering up what otherwise remain scattered experiences to a tangible thing.”
“...could it be the students have divested from the performance of exceptional blackness, a performance that will never save us from the actions of ordinary whiteness...”
“The question is not really whether we’ll be tied to the somethings of our past, but whether we are courageous enough to be tied to the whole of them” -Ta-Nehisi Coates’s testimony before the House Judiciary Committee, 19 June 2019