claudia rankine just us excerpt
. The former U.S. (One hears an echo of Michelle Obamas Convention speech from this year: It is what it is.) But progress, though challenging, doesnt need to be a holy grail; and poetry, though of this world, doesnt need to be tied to it. But thats impossible, Rankine finds. Rankine's questions disrupt the false comfort of our culture's liminal and private spacesthe airport, the theater, the dinner party, the voting booth . A really interesting take on personal essays regarding race-- this memoir/essay collection is one that should definitely be read in physical form rather than as an ebook or audio, as the experience of images and sidebars incorporated into the text is an important part of the overall project of the book. On my way to retrieve my coat I'm paused in the hallway in someone else's home when a man approaches to tell me he thinks his greatest privilege is his height. Rankine has never not known of race, but she shows us life in a country that pretends to be newly awakened, and mourning the dream that it has just lost. If leniency for teens is wrong, why is Tyesha's killer free? Free shipping for many products! Just Us is the record of those encounters. Paperback : 160 pages. He surmises that Black people are wedded more to sensation than reflection. Rankine attends a lot of dinner parties (perhaps too many, it must be said) and is repeatedly subjected to. Copyright 2020. Their accomplishments shouldn't even be taken into consideration as they stand in a first class line waiting to board, they don't use the fact that they could probably wipe the floor in any discussion with the person disrespecting them in a debate (sorry, the first national Presidential "debate" was last night). Claudia Rankine leaves nothing unscrutinised. If her mode of discomfiting those whom she encounters strikes readers as unexpectedly mild, it might be because the strident urgency of racial politics in the U.S. escalated while her book was on its way toward publication. Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment. Just Us: An American Conversation Claudia Rankine. document.getElementById( "ak_js_1" ).setAttribute( "value", ( new Date() ).getTime() ); Of course, the next morning always comes and I find myself in my clinic again, the exam room speaking aloud in all of its blatant metaphorsthe huge clock above where my patients sit implacably measuring lifetimes; the space itself narrow and compressed as a sonnetand immediately Im back to thinking about writing. She shares her own conversations with us those with strangers, acquaintances, and close friends. Whats interesting to me is that we have all of these renowned historians who were happy to give you the one side and to leave out all the rest of it. She writes as an African American woman with a white husband and a mixed race child. Special thanks to Justine Kenin and Art Silverman of All Things Considered. And when we do, how can we strive to stay in the room with one other? . This woman says she lives here. This conundrumno transformation without identification, no identification without transformationspurs the work forward, but not everyone will be persuaded that it matters. When you have children who are 3 years old saying the smartest person is a white person, that is what theyve come to learn, not what they know. The New Yorker may earn a portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our Affiliate Partnerships with retailers. Soon enough, my patients start to arrive, and the way they want me to understand what they are feeling only immerses me more deeply in languages compelling alchemy: The pain is like a cold, bitter wind blowing through my womb, murmurs a young infertile woman from Guatemala with what I have diagnosed much less eloquently as chronic pelvic pain. This book was my gift to myself in 2020 and I am grateful. You wanna tell us whats going on?. Just Us is an invitation to discover what it takes to stay in the room together, even and especially in breaching the silence, guilt, and violence that follow direct addresses of whiteness. To this, he pivots and reports that, unlike other whites who have confessed to him they are scared of Blacks, he is comfortable around Black people because he played basketball. Guest host Audie Cornish talks to Rankine about what she learned about herself and others in these conversations, why she doesn't mind educating others about race, and how we move forward together in tough times. I am white. Dr. Campowill deliver a public lecture called Training the Eye, Hearing the Heart: Art, Poetry, and Healingon April 21st at 12pm at the Blanton Museum of Art, sponsored by the Texas Institute for Literary and Textual Studies, with support from the Humanities Institute. Her new book, Just Us: An American Conversation which brings Rankine to the Twin Cities via Zoom on Tuesday for the opening event of this falls Talking Volumes fearlessly addresses historic and contemporary examples of white privilege and supremacy. Rohan Preston covers theater for the Star Tribune. When the door finally opens, the woman standing there yells, at the top of her lungs, Get away from my house. The redirect is so obvious that Rankine blurts out, Am I being silenced?, The technologies of whitenesssilencing, surveilling, policingare supposed to be frictionless for the user. Poet Claudia Rankine and dog Sammy at her home, September 26, 2014. For no good reason, except perhaps inside the inane logic of if you like something so much, you might as well marry it, I ask him, are you married to a Black woman? Interesting book. John McWhorter: The dehumanizing condescension of White Fragility, Both Rankine and her friend are surprised, by the play and by Rankines anger. The physical book itself is gorgeous: thick, smooth pages with wonderful photos. A: Robin DiAngelo [author of the book White Fragility] has gotten a lot of flak lately and its curious to me. Sometimes wry, often vulnerable, and always prescient,Just Usis Rankines most intimate work, less interested in being right than in being true, being together. She wants to discover what new forms of social interaction might arise from such a disruption. This book is poetry and prose, and much of the prose is poetry. "With Just Us, Claudia Rankine offers further proof that she is one of our essential thinkers about race, difference, politics, and the United States of America. This is my house. In this chapter, Rankine excerpts pieces from Thomas Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia (1782), focusing on the Founding Father's ideas about people of African descent. In a nutshell, Rankine urges us to sit down with one another and talk. She has given me much to consider and think about, and I would encourage you to do the same by reading her book. Sign up for the Books & Fiction newsletter. Claudia Rankine has taken the discussion of race up a notch with her book. I said, lady, believe it. via Zoom. Claudia Rankine is a poet, essayist, and playwright.Just Us completes her groundbreaking trilogy, following Don't Let Me Be Lonely and Citizen.She is a MacArthur Fellow and teaches at Yale University. He concludes that whites prejudices, as well as Black peoples long memory of what they had suffered, would divide the state and, ultimately, would end in the extermination of one group or the other. Employing her signature collagelike approach, she avoids polemics, instead earnestly speculating about the possibility of interracial understanding. Another interlocutor suggests that he doesnt see color, and then characterizes his own comment as inane. The exchanges, even the positive ones, inspire a nervous excitement, somewhere between dread and hunger. In fact, this realization feeds into one of her central critiques: that white society is defined by an obstinate refusal to examine itself, and that, as a result, the well of white racial imagination has run dry. This is almost common sense to Black folk. Let's get over ourselves, it's structural not personal.". As everyday white supremacy becomes increasingly vocalized with no clear answers at hand, how best might we approach one another? By Plus disaster and the modern city, Donald Judd, Black mayors remaking the South, Claudia Rankine, Hillary Rodham Clinton on womens rights, and more. . Learn more about our mission and our programs by visiting our website or contact us with your questions. Just add one more stick to the fire and were out. 2023 Cond Nast. He also believes that their griefs are fleeting. Rankine's writing has a way of being strikingly conversational and deeply profound simultaneously. At one gathering, Rankine challenges a man about the 2016 election: his theory of Trumps win seems to elide the role of racism. In "Sexisma Problem with a Name," Sara Ahmed writes that "if you name the problem you . Rankines experimental poetics drew from first-person reportage, visual art, photography, television, and various literary genres, modeling fragmented Black personhood under the daily pressure of white supremacy. Rankine reflects upon "whiteness in America" with intellectual rigor, a poetic sensibility and warmth and honesty. Be still my beating, breaking heart? She probes her unbearable feelings, spools through her friends possible motives, and then shares the dialogue they eventually have, in the course of which her friend explains her unease with situations manufactured specifically to elicit white shame, penance: She resists the thrill of riding the white emotional roller-coaster, impatient with the notion that being chastised, as Darryl Pinckney once put it, constitutes actual learningthat it accomplishes anything. A: Declaring that people from China or Japan or Korea are also invested in whiteness is not an outlandish claim. You have only ever spoken on the phone. Just Us is stunning workaudacious, revelatory, devastating.Robin DiAngelo, With Just Us, Claudia Rankine offers further proof that she is one of our essential thinkers about race, difference, politics, and the United States of America. And if that means using whitening cream or employing the same racial profiling that whites employ against African Americans, they might do it. Or more likely it's always been there but now once again brought into the open. As everyday white supremacy becomes increasingly vocalized with no clear answers at hand, how best might we approach one another? Anyone who turns away from this bold and vital invitation to get to work would be a damn fool.Judith Butler, In my work, well-meaning white people consistently ask me how to recognize racism. In Just Us, Rankine the poet becomes an anthropologist. CHAPTER 1. Unlike the Rankine of Citizen, this Rankine can often soundat least to someone whos followed, and felt, the anger of the spring and summeras though shes arriving on the scene of a radical uprising in order to translate it into language white readers will find palatable. Some people say their thought takes place in images, some in words. (White fragility refers to white peoples tendency to lash out under racial stress; some have criticized the theory for painting a simplistic picture of Black people.) A medley of poetry, academic research and more anecdotal conversations Rankine has with friends and contemporaries, I found this accessible and stimulating and would recommend it to others looking for a unique book on race. Megacool Blog indeed! if anyone else has anything it would be much appreciated. When we begin to think about African Americans being more vulnerable to COVID-19, what youre really saying is that our closeness to precarity is a step away. Poet Claudia Rankine is back with a new book called Just Us: An American Conversation. And she couldnt believe it. A hotter and blunter activism has engulfed the United States in the wake of George Floyds murder. The author of this book is black. . See our calendar on the left sidebar for more information. Rankines intent is not simply to expose or chastise whiteness. . All rights reserved. After a while, I realized that I was reading Just Us as a kind of grail quest. Isabel Wilkerson on Caste, about the history of systemic racism (Oct. 13). A: I wanted to come up with a structure where the form and content were allied to each other. There is an air of strange, exacting, half-understood rules, and of dangerous illusions. This is not a lecture its meditative and personal. Rankine also began exploring the ways in which whiteness conceals itself behind the facade of an unraced universal identity. Yet, once you understand this about the book, a sort of spell takes hold. A major defamation lawsuit against Fox News goes to trial Tuesday, carrying the potential to shed additional light on former President Donald Trump's election lies, reveal more about how the right-leaning network operates and even redefine libel law in the U.S. Rankine is a Jamaican immigrant and first-generation college graduate who travels in largely white professional and communal spaces. In this genre-defying work, [Claudia Rankine], as she did so effectively in Citizen, combines poetry, essay, visuals, scholarship, analysis, invective, and argument into a passionate and persuasive case about many of the complex mechanics of race in this country. $35.89 + $34.25 shipping. "Among white people, black people are allowed to talk about their precarious lives, but they are not allowed to implicate the present companyto create discomfort by pointing out the facts is seen as socially unacceptable. 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