Description

A TLS, FINANCIAL TIMES, NEW STATESMAN, GUARDIAN AND OBSERVER BOOK OF THE YEAR

From award-winning writer Claudia Rankine, the stunning follow-up to Citizen and Don’t Let Me Be Lonely

‘Audacious, revelatory, devastating’ Robin DiAngelo

At home and in government, contemporary America finds itself riven by a culture war in which aggression and defensiveness alike are on the rise. It is not alone. In such partisan conditions, how can humans best approach one another across our differences?

Taking the study of whiteness and white supremacy as a guiding light, Claudia Rankine explores a series of real encounters with friends and strangers – each disrupting the false comfort of spaces where our public and private lives intersect, like the airport, the theatre, the dinner party and the voting booth – and urges us to enter into the conversations which could offer the only humane pathways through this moment of division.

Just Us is an invitation to discover what it takes to stay in the room together, and to breach the silence, guilt and violence that surround whiteness. Brilliantly arranging essays, images and poems along with the voices and rebuttals of others, it counterpoints Rankine’s own text with facing-page notes and commentary, and closes with a bravura study of women confronting the political and cultural implications of dyeing their hair blonde.

Wry, vulnerable and prescient, this is Rankine’s most intimate work, less interested in being right than in being true, and being together.

Publisher Review

Fiercely intimate, rigorous . . . [Just Us] lets all of us in on the conversations – with others and the self – that are necessary for survival — Nuar Alsadir In Just Us, Claudia Rankine continues her remarkable and brilliant interrogation of the language, culture, and history that have shaped America, forging through poems, essays, and documents a literary archive that is utterly original and desperately needed — Dinaw Mengestu In my work, well-meaning 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 . . . With clarity and grace, Claudia Rankine delivers a gut punch to white denial. Just Us is stunning work – audacious, revelatory, devastating — Robin DiAngelo This brilliant and multi-layered work is a call, a bid, an insistent, rightly impatient demand for a public conversation on whiteness . . . bold and vital — Judith Butler Claudia Rankine marshalls the full range of her substantial talents – from poetry to essay – to explore how racism is lived, privilege is expressed and engagement might be possible. Personal, political, interrogative and, most all, impressive — Gary Younge