Just Us
Page 17
3. Text How am I to interpret their comfort with children sleeping on concrete floors in detention centers dedicated to the suffering unto death of these children?
Notes and Sources Masha Gessen, “The Unimaginable Reality of American Concentration Camps,” the New Yorker: “One side always argues that nothing can be as bad as the Holocaust, therefore nothing can be compared to it; the other argues that the cautionary lesson of history can be learned only by acknowledging the similarities between now and then. But the argument is really about how we perceive history, ourselves, and ourselves in history. We learn to think of history as something that has already happened, to other people. Our own moment, filled as it is with minutiae destined to be forgotten, always looks smaller in comparison…. Hitler, or Stalin, comes to look like a two-dimensional villain—someone whom contemporaries could not have seen as a human being. The Holocaust, or the Gulag, are such monstrous events that the very idea of rendering them in any sort of gray scale seems monstrous, too. This has the effect of making them, essentially, unimaginable. In crafting the story of something that should never have been allowed to happen, we forge the story of something that couldn’t possibly have happened. Or, to use a phrase only slightly out of context, something that can’t happen here.”
4. Text “Like it or not these are not our kids. Show them compassion but it’s not like he is doing this to the people of Idaho or Texas. These are people from another country.”
Notes and Sources Brian Kilmeade
5. Text uppgivenhetssyndrom
Notes and Sources Rachel Aviv, “The Trauma of Facing Deportation,” the New Yorker.
6. Text One hesitates to call them living: one hesitates to call their death death, in the face of which they have no fear, as they are too tired to understand.
Notes and Sources Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz: The Nazi Assault on Humanity. Translated by Stuart Woolf.
7. Text … on Zoom social distancing, wherever—one conversation has already occurred between you and me as our encounter newly unfolds.
Notes and Sources Steve Neavling, “Black People Make Up 12% of Michigan’s Population—and At Least 40% of Its Coronavirus Deaths,” Detroit Metro Times, April 2, 2020: “‘There is no question that the COVID-19 outbreak is having a more significant effect on marginalized and poorer communities, particularly communities of color,’ Dr. Joneigh Khaldun, Michigan’s chief medical executive, tells Metro Times. ‘While COVID-19 can infect anyone regardless of race or class, African Americans have historically been more likely to have higher rates of chronic medical conditions such as heart disease, diabetes, and cancer in the United States. We know that people with these underlying medical conditions are more likely to become severely ill from COVID-19.’”
8. Text In 2008 and 2012, people of color, in the defined categories of blacks, Asians, and Hispanics (leaving out Middle Eastern and Indigenous peoples to the category of Other), managed to elect a black president despite a majority of the white vote going to white candidates.
Notes and Sources
9. A friend finished reading the final pages of Just Us and said flatly, there’s no strategy here. No? I asked. Her impatience had to do with a desire for a certain type of action. How to tell her, response is my strategy. Endless responses and study and adjustments and compromises become a life. What I didn’t say to her but what I should have said is that it’s the not newness of white supremacy and the not newness of my inquiry that returns me to the page to reengage.
Our silence, our refusal of discomfort, our willful blindness, the shut-down feeling that refuses engagement, the rage that cancels complexity of response are also strategies. So is the need for answers and new strategies. The call for a strategy is a strategy, and I both respect and understand the necessity of that call.
For some of us, and I include myself here, remaining in the quotidian of disturbance is our way of staying honest until another strategy offers a new pathway, an as-yet-unimagined pathway that allows existing structures to stop replicating. Until then, to forfeit the ability to attempt again, to converse again, to speak with, to question, and to listen to, is to be complicit with the violence of an unchanging structure contending with the aliveness and constant movement of all of us.
In this way I remind myself of the faithful who signed up for the long game. The civil rights folks with religious perspective are perhaps the most admirable. People like Ruby Sales, who remains committed to engaging what she names “the culture of whiteness,” always have my undying respect. In 1965, when a white man, Jonathan Daniels, knocked her down thus taking a shotgun blast meant for her, fired by another white man, Tom Coleman, she says she stood between the best and the worst our democracy has to offer.
The murkiness as we exist alongside each other calls us forward. I don’t want to forget that I am here; at any given moment we are, each of us, next to any other capable of both the best and the worst our democracy has to offer.
IMAGE AND TEXT PERMISSION ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
page 14 From the collection of Hermann Zschiegner.
page 18 © Claudia Rankine
page 20 © Reflective Democracy Campaign
page 22 Reproduced with the permission of Reverend Traci Blackmon.
page 23 © Claudia Rankine
page 28 Titus Kaphar. Error of Repetition {where are you?}, 2011, oil on canvas. Image courtesy of the artist.
page 30 Manthia Diawara, “Conversation with Édouard Glissant Aboard the Queen Mary II” from Edouard Glissant: One World in Relation (August 2009). Translation by Christopher Winks. Used with permission of the filmmaker and translator.
page 32 © John Lucas and Claudia Rankine
page 36 Photo © John Lucas
page 38 © John Lucas
page 40 © John Lucas
page 54 Courtesy of Ruby Sales.
page 54 Courtesy of Virginia Military Institute Archives.
page 64 © David Gifford / Science Photo Library
page 74 © Reginald Seabrooks
page 80 From the Todd-Bingham Picture Collection and Family Papers, Yale University Manuscripts & Archives Digital Images Database, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut
page 86 © Paul Graham
page 92 © Mark Peterson
page 98 © Bettmann / Getty Images
pages 108–117 Graphic design by John Lucas. Scans courtesy of Beinecke Library, Yale University.
page 122 © Bettman / Getty Images
page 126 © Mark Peterson
page 130 © Mark Peterson
page 140 © Mark Peterson
page 144 Hank Willis Thomas, ALL LI ES MATTER. A special edition to benefit Public Art Fund, 2019. Screen print with UV gloss clear on 270gsm ebony paper. Unframed dimensions: 24 × 18 in.
page 156 Garry Winogrand, Laughing Woman with Ice Cream Cone. © The Estate of Garry Winogrand. Courtesy of the Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco.
pages 160–161 © M. Evenson
page 165 © Gordon Parks. Courtesy of the Gordon Parks Foundation and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.
page 182 © Michael David Murphy
page 186 © Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center
page 188 © Mark Peterson
pages 196, 198, 200, 202, 206 From Sister Outsider by Audre Lorde. Published by Crossing Press. Copyright © 1984, 2007 by Audre Lorde. Used herein by permission of the Charlotte Sheedy Literary Agency.
page 204–205 Photos © John Lucas
pages 213–215 Graphic design and redaction by John Lucas
p. 228 © Bettmann / Getty Images
page 240 “Afro-Latino: A deeply rooted identity among U.S. Hispanics,” Pew Research Center, Washington, DC. March 1, 2016. www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/03/01/afro-latino-a-deeply-rooted-identity-among-u-s-hispanics/
page 244 © Kevin Mazur / Getty Images
page 244 © Michael S. Schwartz / Getty Images
page 246 Copyright © 1946. Los Angeles Times. Used with permission.
page 246
From the New York Times. © 1954 The New York Times Company. All rights reserved. Used under license.
page 252 © Matthew Thompson, matthewthompsonphotography.com
page 262 © Mark Peterson
page 263 © Mark Peterson
page 265 © Mark Peterson
pages 268, 269, 275, 278 © John Lucas and Claudia Rankine
page 282 © Deana Lawson
page 283 © John Lucas and Claudia Rankine
page 288 © Lee Balterman / The Life Premium Collection / Getty Images
page 289 © John Lucas
pages 290-291, 292, 297, 301, 302 © John Lucas and Claudia Rankine
page 304 © Charlotte Lagarde
page 320 From the Atlantic. © 2014 The Atlantic Monthly Group, LLC. All rights reserved. Used under license.
page 326 Hank Willis Thomas, Pledge. © Hank Willis Thomas. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.
page 328 The Washington Post / Getty Images
page 330 Wikipedia, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_United_States_presidential_election. Used under a Creative Common license.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
“liminal spaces i” first appeared in the New York Times Magazine, in print as “Brief Encounters with White Men” and online as “I Wanted to Know What White Men Thought about Their Privilege. So I Asked.”
An early version of “complicit freedoms” first appeared on BBC Radio under the title “Claudia Rankine: On Whiteness,” produced by Jo Wheeler.
Included images of blondness first appeared in “Stamped,” a collaboration with John Lucas at Pioneer Works.
This book would not have been possible without the rigorous and supportive accompaniment of Jeff Shotts, Fiona McCrae, Chantz Erolin, Katie Dublinski, and everyone at Graywolf Press who supported its publication.
I would especially like to thank all those who showed up as readers and shared their time and brilliance in the making of Just Us: Nuar Alsadir, Catherine Barnett, Alexandra Bell, Lauren Berlant, Jen Bervin, Sarah Blake, Jericho Brown, Jane Caflisch, P. Carl, Prudence Carter, Jeff Clark, Allison Coudert, Whitney Dow, Teresita Fernández, Adam Fitzgerald, Roxane Gay, Louise Glück, Sana Goldberg, Michael Goodman, Karen Green, Catherine Gund, Claire Gutierrez, Navid Hafez, James Heyman, Christine Hume, Kassidi Jones, Titus Kaphar, Nancy Kuhl, Charlotte LaGarde, Deana Lawson, Walt Lehmann, Casey Llewellyn, Beth Loffreda, Tracy Biga MacLean, Tracey Meares, Leah Mirakhor, Maryam I. Parhizkar, Mark Peterson, Adam Plunkett, Kathryn Potts, Corey Ruzicano, Sarah Schulman, Cera Smith, Kristen Tracy, Jennifer Ullman, Maggie Winslow, and Damon Zappacosta.
To those integral to the intricacies of my everyday, Emily Skillings, Ana Paula Simoes, and Alison Granucci, immeasurable gratitude.
Frances Coady, thank you for being peerless.
Special heartfelt thanks go to my constant collaborators John Lucas and Ula Lucas for their undying support, love, and patience.
Claudia Rankine is the author of six previous books, including The White Card: A Play and Citizen: An American Lyric, which was a New York Times best seller and winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the Forward Prize, and many other awards. In 2016, Rankine cofounded the Racial Imaginary Institute (TRII). She is a MacArthur Fellow and the Frederick Iseman Professor of Poetry at Yale University.
claudiarankine.com
The text of Just Us is set in Bembo and Avenir Next Condensed. Book design and composition by John Lucas. Manufactured by Friesens on acid-free paper.
Table of Contents
Note to the Reader
Half Title Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Contents
what if
liminal spaces i
evolution
lemonade
outstretched
daughter
notes on the state of whiteness
tiki torches
study on white male privilege
tall
social contract
violent
sound and fury
big little lies
ethical loneliness
liminal spaces ii
josé martí
boys will be boys
complicit freedoms
whitening
liminal spaces iii
Image and Text Permission Acknowledgments
Acknowledgments
About the Author