Just Us

An American Conversation

By: Claudia Rankine

Narrated by: Janina Edwards

Claudia Rankine’s Citizen changed the conversation - Just Us urges all of us into it.

As everyday white supremacy becomes increasingly vocalized with no clear answers at hand, how best might we approach one another? Claudia Rankine, without telling us what to do, urges us to begin the discussions that might open pathways through this divisive and stuck moment in American history.

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. Rankine’s questions disrupt the false comfort of our culture’s liminal and private spaces - the airport, the theater, the dinner party, the voting booth - where neutrality and politeness live on the surface of differing commitments, beliefs, and prejudices as our public and private lives intersect.

This brilliant arrangement of essays, poems, and images includes the voices and rebuttals of others: White men in first class responding to, and with, their White male privilege; a friend’s explanation of her infuriating behavior at a play; and women confronting the political currency of dying their hair blonde, all running alongside fact-checked notes and commentary that complements Rankine’s own text, complicating notions of authority and who gets the last word.

Sometimes wry, often vulnerable, and always prescient, Just Us is Rankine’s most intimate work, less interested in being right than in being true, being together.

©2020 Claudia Rankine (P)2020 Audible, Inc.

Thank you

Excellent book and appreciate the honesty. Open our eyes and open our hearts to gain understanding.

A Different Telling of the Same Perspective

This is unfortunately the same story in regards to race relations. The difference is in the perspective. It comes off as the enlightened viewpoint of a person whose profession allows careful introspection as well as observation of others in regards to race relations. The context is both hard hitting and yet poetic at points.

The presentation as nearly flawless. My only issue is one that the can't honestly be controlled by the actress but my feelings are my feelings, so minus one star.

Love it

Excellent. I want to read it again. Realistic view of present discrimination and its lasting affects in America.

Thank you

I am in tears as I reflect on the liminial spaces we share between humanity and compassion. I have reflected much on how much the social construct which is race enables and disables us in our il interactions and interpretations of the world around us. Some where within that conversation a sense humanity and how we value one another needs to be reevaluated. This book did just that.