Rankine began working on Just Us long before the chaos of anti-blackness in America (and the entire world) erupted into the fever-pitch year of 2020. I hesitate to say that now was the moment perfect for this book to launch… it’s not as if cultures thriving off racism and/or prejudice haven’t been around since before we were all born. Unfortunately, there’s always been (and if things don’t change, always will be) an urgent need for such work.
Just Us is not aimed at white people: the intention is not for us to sit inactively and be told simple instructions of what to do and think. Rankine’s writing leans towards prompting white people to think introspectively about themselves as racialized human beings. But she wants to take this further, to make sure introspection does not become self-reflexive and insular; an empty pat on the back with no further manifestations in actual dealings with other human beings. Just Us is sub-titled An American Conversation, and that’s what Rankine is trying to initiate: how people across and within racial groups can conduct conversations around the topics of white supremacy and anti-blackness to actually foster understanding and action, rather than sclerotic knee-jerk emotion. A conversation that must be attempted if white people are to understand what we have done and keep doing to communities we wish to live alongside with (if this really is the case for the majority of white people), and all thrive.
Rankine mines her personal life, her interactions with white people- specifically experiences trying to converse with white people about race- and uses them as case studies for analysing attitudes and the realities informing them. Seemingly innocuous events like dinner parties or airport queueing are analysed with a poet’s imagination, slowing down encounters to try and reason with what they hold. This attention to such personal minutiae could seem irrelevant or abstract against recent pushes for more structural awareness about how white supremacy locks itself in place using corporate and state institutions. White people are constantly being told it isn’t us as people who are to blame, but ‘the system’. Here, Rankine makes personal the political battleground: shows how the world in which we exist has everything and nothing to do with how we conduct ourselves.
In particular, I found Complicit Freedoms to be very thought provoking; an essay that wrestles with the significance and reasonings behind why women dye their hair blonde. As a bottle-blonde myself, I started ruminating on questions that had never been obvious to my mind alone before. The racial politics that create the conditions which fuel the social aspirations giving hair colour the resonance it has are at once so obvious it’s embarrassing to admit not having considered it before; yet simultaneously so disparate and abstract, how could anyone have arrived at these thoughts all alone? Reading Just Us, it’s like I could feel the weight of history tangling out my head, snapping off into various split-ends trying to come up with answers blown in from the coming future. Rankine situated little old me into the seemingly ineffable continuum of white supremacy, and it’s this melding of minutiae with the massive that gives Rankine a voice of both caustic scrutiny and non-judgemental questioning.
Whilst Just Us does deal heavily in the embrace of misunderstanding and the not-yet-known, Rankine is sure to ground her experience and opinions in irrefutable facts. Whenever her writing enunciates a potentially ‘provocative’ statement, Rankine interrupts the prose to disperse contextual facts throughout rather than use traditional footnotes to trawl post-text. I think this style aids her critical exposure of whiteness, as the factual additions mean that what could potentially be disregarded as pure opinion or ‘subjective bias’ is firmly backed up. Almost as if the book anticipates counter-arguments and interrupts the derailing that whiteness so often facilitates and enables to squash anti-racist discussion. Rankine derails whiteness before it has a chance to derail her.
Another topic Rankine brings up which interested me was the white co-option of anti-racist vocabulary. As the publishing industry panders to a white audience, yet again centring the demands of white people over anyone else, books appear which give all the lexicon and rhetoric, without any further instruction for implementation or introspection. White people can talk and not really mean a word of what they say, safe in the comfort they have done the ‘duty’ of saying ‘the right thing’; they become verbose diagnosing ‘fragility’, or ‘checking’ the privilege of other white people— forgetting the finger that points casts a shadow. Anti-racist vocabulary becomes another way for whites to insulate themselves from critical self-assessment, creating distance between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ white people. Rankine talks about her husband thinking he understands fully his role as a white man concerning her experiences as a black woman, to which Rankine is bemused. How can such complex relations be summed up in so few words? To me, this is where I saw the poet in her most clearly. How to name a thing means to both bring it alive and to kill it. Making space for what it is, cutting it off from all it can never be. This reliance on authoritative language is another aspect of whiteness trying to simplify nuance, to create distance and binaries; preventing the opportunity for generative mistakes, to be honest about what is complicated.
However, Rankine is also critical of the gaps in her own knowledge. In revealing the error of her ways when identifying too closely with a rich WASP friend, or her own lacking knowledge concerning the situation of Latinx people in the USA, Rankine demonstrates that absolutely nobody knows everything about everyone all of the time. We have to be willing to make mistakes without dying of shame. In these moments, whiteness reveals itself to be more than the colour of skin: it’s like bad air conditioning being circulated around through all of us. An assumed ignorance, a comfortable corruption that thrives off willful ignorance and the violence that ensues when not dealt with properly.
Just Us is at once a sober examination of the current state of racial affairs, and tenuously hopeful. There’s no evidence that white people en masse have collectively and critically engaged with how to materially address the devastation of white supremacy. However, by analysing her interactions with white people and opening up a space for consideration and argument, Rankine demonstrates how a necessary part of building bridges for collective conversation will only occur once we can honestly speak with ourselves. Not being afraid of saying the wrong thing, not being afraid of learning so eventually we can come to meet each other face to face.