Just Us

by Claudia Rankine

  Was my slipup simply a misplaced desire to calcify our connection, or is there more? Was the slip an otherworldly desire to become my friend, take on the trappings of her white life, and form a semblance of equality that can never exist? I understand that my need even to ask this question is formulated within a white-centered framework that believes all aspirational life is toward whiteness. The framework of white hierarchy has been behind the making of a culture I am both subject to and within. Consequently, I know how easily my actions could be formed by it. Why not want the thing that offers the most lasting and stable, if at times toxic and dehumanizing, value?

  The life I’ve made is my life, and though it overlaps with what’s also desired by white people like my WASP friend—our houses, for example—there are agendas that build precariousness and trauma into any professional success I have achieved that must remain more primary for me. An essential desire for equity and the ability to live freely without the fear of white terrorism literally trumps everything, as former first lady Michelle Obama expresses in Becoming.

  Unless something structural shifts in ways that remain unimaginable, the life my friend has is not a life I can achieve. Ever. Her kind of security, because it’s not merely monetary, is atmospheric and therefore is not transferable. It’s what reigns invisible behind the term “white.” It doesn’t inoculate her from illness, loss, or forfeiture of wealth, but it ensures a level of citizenry, safety, mobility, and belonging I can never have. Neither of us is baffled by our particular, random, well-earned, unearned, historical, or inherited differences. It is in fact my friend’s ability to grasp and hold our differences that creates both our facility with each other and our antagonisms. But why, even for a second, translate ease with each other into a state of sameness?

  If no sameness of status is possible, even within my closest white friendships, how to account for closeness? What form of relation can include knowledge of historical dynamics and societal realities without preventing or interrupting intimacy? If similarity and sameness are essentially impossible, how is “difference” recouped and aligned with closeness? How do we keep all the differences on the table and still call that a friendship?

  I long to trust in our feelings of closeness, a closeness years in the making that wrestled racism and racist assumptions to the surface of our hurt feelings and profound disappointments. I wish to stop time and have feelings of intimacy blanket all time, both historical time and the years that took us from our late twenties to our late fifties. But to stop being conscious of my friend’s innate advantages is to stop being present inside our relationship. To remember the truth of us is to be in the truth of us, in all its realities and all its stumbles and slips. Then our friendship is what allows us to fall away from the ease of intimacy without falling.

  My friend already knows the truth of her life before I call it forward.4 Her ability not to push aside the moment of my self-correct, a moment that happens with language, language that seems to distance us from each other in its effort to know precisely, points to her ability to hold and recognize her advantages, her disadvantages, her whiteness, alongside my blackness, my disadvantages, and my advantages, despite our similarities.

  The two-step, just us, no, you and I, that I enacted is one she, I hope, kept in step with. I doubt she would have corrected me had I not corrected myself, but that aside, together we allowed racial difference, as constructed as it is, as real as it is, not to become for us a source of acrimonious silence. Our fortitude, our resilience with regard to each other’s differences becomes in day-to-day life our friendship.

  Still, when I asked her to respond to an earlier version of this piece, she said she had no thoughts of interest. I keep wondering how she, a writer with a wealth of thoughts and imaginings, had suddenly gone bankrupt.

  NOTES

  1. Text This claim hasn’t completely left my lips before I’m stalled by the thought that I have no inherited wealth…

  Notes and Sources Darrick Hamilton and William A. Darity Jr.’s 2017 article “The Political Economy of Education, Financial Literacy, and the Racial Wealth Gap” argues that “inheritance, bequest, and in vivo transfer account for more of the racial wealth gap than any other behavioral, demographic, or socioeconomic indicator…. The intergenerational racial wealth gap was structurally created and has virtually nothing to do with individual or racialized choices. The source of inequality is structural, not behavioral—intrafamily transfers provide some young adults with the capital to purchase a wealth-generating asset such as a home, a new business, or a debt-free college education that will appreciate over a lifetime. Access to this non-merit-based seed money is not based on some action or inaction on the part of the individual, but rather the familial position into which they are born.”

  2. Text …; but typically, even if we arrived in the same dorm room, we don’t actually wind up in the same place economically, since whites have ten times the net worth of blacks.

  Fact Check Yes. According to Pew and Brandeis University’s Institute on Assets and Social Policy, in 2016 the median wealth of white households was ten times the median wealth of black households.

  Notes and Sources Pew: “In 2019, the median wealth of white households was $171,000. That’s 10 times the wealth of black households ($17,150).” Tom Shapiro, director of the Institute on Assets and Social Policy, confirmed these figures via email.

  3. Text Any attempt to erase these differences ultimately destabilizes us, because, despite our many connections, despite sitting across from each other, we have been pushed out of a structure from opposing ends, through the doorway of our shared culture, to sit across from each other.

  Notes and Sources

  4. Text My friend already knows the truth of her life before I call it forward.

  Notes and Sources Dorothy A. Brown, “Shades of the American Dream,” Washington University Law Review: “Whites are most likely to own their own homes (76%), followed by Asians (61%), Latinos (49%), and blacks (48%). Race matters when it comes to being a homeowner. Being white makes you significantly more likely to own a home than if you are Asian, black, or Latino…. Even though Asians are more likely to be homeowners than blacks and Latinos, given that Asian median income is higher than white median income, we might expect to see even higher homeownership rates for Asians than whites—yet we do not…. Homeownership disparities by race and ethnicity are not solely attributable to differences in income. Even at high income levels, a smaller percentage of blacks and Latinos are homeowners than whites. In 2005, for every income level, black homeownership rates were less than the overall homeownership rates by income.”

  ethical loneliness

  i

  I go to see Fairview, a play by Jackie Sibblies Drury, with a white female friend. She’s interested in thinking about whiteness; this play is interested in thinking about race. We are covered in all directions.

  Near the end of the play, the fourth wall is broken. A character asks the white members of the audience to get up from their seats and walk on the stage, which has been transformed into a beige living and dining room with a staircase leading to the second floor. Faces will be revealed, composure tested. Effort must be made to stay within the requests of the play. The black actor wishes the space of the audience to hold black people in a way the world does not. The request is presented as a conditional—what if? What if the audience, in this space of the imagination, can enact something that doesn’t exist in our world?

  Is the stage now a segregated space as the black actors join the blacks in the audience? Has center stage transformed into the front of the bus? Or is it now a Whites Only boardroom? In the moment, no one knows what really is being proclaimed. A white man in the seat behind me says, This is fucked up. Nonetheless, he makes his way to the stage.

  The white woman I am with remains in her seat. I am getting tense. The playwright is a black woman, and I am a black woman, and I want her play to have what it has requested. What I assume it needs. Is my identific
ation with the playwright because she’s black, or because she’s a woman, or because she’s an artist? It’s impossible to dissect. My tension begins to couple with a building resentment against my white friend. I feel betrayed by her.

  I am not the playwright. The playwright might think the success of the play depends on some white people staying in their seats. The playwright might be waiting for a black person to get on the stage with the white people. None do. The playwright might want me to think her request is divisive and walk out of the theater: not a black stage, not a white stage, but a “United Stage.” The playwright might have calculated what percentage of the audience, “white members of the audience,” would not comply. Are my unbearable feelings a sign that I, a black member of the audience, remain inside the play? The playwright might think, Why are they listening to me? as more and more white audience members fill up the stage and people of color stay seated. Will the stage hold all the white people? Or, and this is what is troubling me, the playwright might have said exactly what she wants to happen.

  I am trying to listen to the actor speak the closing lines of the play, which it turns out are composed of quotes from famous black writers, but all I can think about is my white friend’s non-compliant presence in her seat. Why won’t she do what was asked? I can’t understand why she can’t do such a simple thing. Why can’t she see it matters? Does it matter? In the sense that race matters, her refusal feels like an insistence on full ownership of the entire theater. Oh, God. I am beginning to feel pushed out of my own seat for the last minutes of the play. Burdened by my association with her refusal, a moment of Fremdschämen perhaps.

  Taxi.

  I want to run. Away from what? An embodied refusal I can’t help but see and one that surprises me? My own mounting emotion in the face of what I perceive as belligerence? A friendship error despite my understanding of how whiteness functions? I thought we shared the same worldview, if not the same privileges. Be still my beating, breaking heart?

  When the play finally ends, I say to my confounding friend, I didn’t know you were black.

  She doesn’t respond.

  Given the irritation in my voice, it’s not a comment seeking a response. It’s my performance of my own refusal to engage beyond the terms of the play. Her performance of resistance felt like no solidarity, insofar as I, as a black person, dropped away as the request of the play dropped away. She must understand the play’s request is made in response to a world where black people’s requests don’t matter. Why doesn’t she recognize the moment as an offering of black Feminism?

  Though my friend and I are in the habit of checking in every few days, over the next couple of weeks we speak of everything but this day. Still, I can’t stop returning to the image of her glued to her seat. She was five rows from the stage. Why does the memory continue to infuriate and perplex me? Why am I not able to read this moment? Why am I not able to stop reading this moment? Why am I unable to settle it down and file it away?

  I attempt to answer my silent questions by remembering my therapist once told me that some white patients who identify with trauma and victimization see themselves as black or Jewish in their dreams. Their understanding of what they have experienced, how they feel, becomes apprehensible only through the lens of antiblack racism or anti-Semitism. To fully embody their pain, their trauma, they need it to mirror historical, institutional structures that are defined by an incomprehensible event like slavery or the Holocaust. Their feelings of loneliness, stuckness, or stasis feel similar to, though different from, what the theorist Jill Stauffer describes as ethical loneliness. Her exact words are “Ethical loneliness is the isolation one feels when one, as a violated person or as one member of a persecuted group, has been abandoned by humanity, or by those who have power over one’s life’s possibilities.”

  Is my friend’s refusal to move, to be seen moving, a move she needed to make? Is it a message, a performance of one? Is she telling the black audience, you all don’t get to look at me. You don’t get to see me as a white specimen. This is fucked up, the man behind me had said. The unconscious, as I understand it, can lose context or perspective. Maybe my friend cannot bear to be told what to do, and how that started and where it will end has little to do with her whiteness or everything to do with her whiteness. My perception of a blind spot around racial dynamics could lead to a larger discussion of white feminism and white entitlement. Maybe I am only responding to her whiteness because the play constructed a scene around our unshared racial positioning. Maybe my own line of reasoning is such a stretch that it’ll snap back to hit me in the face. Nonetheless, an incoherent sting lingers. I can’t let it go. I won’t let it go. What do you care? I ask myself. And still I care about the architecture of my intimacy with this woman. From this moment forward how easily will the pronoun “we” slip from my lips?

  I ask my friend, this white woman who speaks of understanding and empathizing with so much, Why didn’t you go onto the stage? She looks at me. Is there a pause? Time seems to gather the space of the differences between us. She says, I didn’t want to.

  I’m still looking at her. What does she see in my face? You didn’t want to? Is she speaking about exhaustion? Exhaustion I can understand. Exhaustion is tied to fatigue, and addressing the onslaught of an eternally rejuvenating racism brings forward fatigue in all of us. Or, is this simply, I don’t have to do what a black woman tells me to do. I am white. Can’t you see that?

  I didn’t want to. And what I want is what matters. At the end, in the end, I am a white woman. I am the one who matters. I didn’t want to. Are these the unspoken sentences that I am to defer to?

  Within the little that I know of this woman, and this moment seems to show how little the little is, I know her answer to me is no answer. I know the real answer, or more realistically the real exploration, is within the conversations she has with other people, perhaps other white people, perhaps her white therapist. Those conversations in my imagination hold me as the one who cannot let anything go—anything like slavery, as if slavery hasn’t morphed and adapted itself to our century through mass incarceration and institutional inequities—because of my own overwhelming sense of, of, of, yes, ethical loneliness. I am not her confidante. I am not to be shared with. I am not one—I am not the one she trusts with her whiteness. I am not, as I had thought, the friend I imagine.

  These are the missteps, misunderstandings, and recognitions of friendships. After I write all this down, I share it with her because we are friends. I don’t want it between us as either surprise or secret. I tell her its content is ours to deal with first. We are both learning how to move through our understandings together. She says the piece correctly narrates what she said and did, so she doesn’t feel misrepresented. The thoughts are mine, but the actions are indeed hers. Then she explains that she “felt harangued by the play along familiar lines. I didn’t want to move. I didn’t want to be in this.” Hers was a “frustrating and frustrated feeling, a sad feeling, also a taken-to-task-again feeling, all at once.” She also felt the play was brilliant and doesn’t wish the play to have done anything differently.

  And then she did something I didn’t expect but that explains why we are friends. She sat down and wrote.

  ii

  So of course, post-talking to you, and aided by the gym’s treadmill, my brain started popping more thoughts (part of why I so love talking to you). Only now getting a chance to put thoughts down.

  Maybe of interest to you and important to me: I know I shrink, sometimes a lot, sometimes a little, from scenes where I’m asked, personally or generally, to feel bad as a white person—where, whatever else is being asked, I’m also being asked to feel shame, guilt, to do penance, to stand corrected, to sit down chastised. Obviously, some of this shrinking is just because—who wouldn’t?—no one enjoys being chastised. Or do they? This is where my reaction becomes important to me: I react with a kind of nausea when I smell, as Darryl Pinckney put it, “White audiences [who] confuse having bee
n chastised with learning” (in his NYRB piece about Afro-pessimism). Of course, there are reasons to feel shame, guilt, to be corrected, etc.—that is, there is real history, and there are real situations and experiences and exchanges that call for them, and some of my reaction is (per “who wouldn’t?”) straight-up defensive. But situations (claims, blogposts, diversity workshop activities, whatever) manufactured specifically to elicit white shame, penance, etc., make me uneasy—I feel like unholy transactions are in the offing, like white moral masochism is getting a thrill.

  I think I’ve told you this story, but I remember, at a diversity workshop, a new colleague, a young white man, saying that the hardest thing about work on diversity, equity, and inclusion (the blank we were asked to fill in) was something like not letting the emotional challenges of the work, and the psychic toll of it, convince him that he had done something just by riding the white emotional roller-coaster. Is it too much of a rationalization to say that I didn’t want to play along with the display of white shame and resolve at the end (much as I thought it was a brilliant way to end the play) because it felt like an enactment of just this?

  Some of the frustration and exhaustion I felt in that moment had to do with how repetitive the calls for white people to look at ourselves, to step up, to move off our comfortable asses, etc., are. That the calls were quotations (I think Hughes, Du Bois, Alain Locke, maybe Hurston) made perfect sad sense to me: I suspect some of my frustration, exhaustion, and sadness is that the calls get made, over and over and over, brilliantly and urgently, and so many white people shrug, or thrill to them emotionally but then do nothing.

  Of course, in a way I was doing nothing by sitting, and there was no way from the outside to know what I was thinking—the easiest thought to attribute to me might have been “This is fucked up,” and in a way, that is the right thought. I think that if other white people had not gotten up, or if it seemed like not enough were getting up, I would have. I wanted the play to work; I tend to feel responsible. I think I hoped my resisting the stage could somehow be a piece of a fully successful ending: not all the white people got up—interesting.