A Review of Claudia Rankine’s Just Us — November 18, 2020 by Jerome Murphy
Claudia Rankine’s latest work, a multimedia affair like the era-defining Citizen: An American Lyric, quickly starts to remind a reader of Pablo Neruda’s The Book of Questions. Here, questions circle the crucible of America’s racial division: “How is a call to change named shame, / named penance, named chastisement?” Rooted in a terrain where even well-meaning gestures can perpetuate harm, such questions quickly branch and divide, like offshoots of Neruda’s “pear tree [with] more leaves than Remembrance of Things Past.” Standing in the shadow of America’s own pained past (and present), Rankine wants to know: “Was there a possibility of love and a laughter that lived outside the structure that brought us together?”
There is indeed, Rankine suggests, but it’s not easily won, and holding these 342 pages, abundant in photographs, charts, and text of all kinds, one feels the heft of the questions. One also feels a resonant truth in such assertions as the following: “Among white people, black people are allowed to talk about their precarious lives, but they are not allowed to implicate the present company in that precariousness.” Bracingly, Rankine breaks this unspoken rule. Just Us offers accounts of decorum-puncturing exchanges with strangers and friends, most of them white, which take place at dinner parties, theaters, on city streets, and most memorably, in what she calls the “liminal spaces” of airport waiting areas and planes. Such exchanges reveal the paradox of a proximity to power that exacts its own psychic costs, as expressed in one of Rankine’s lyrical passages:
At the bone of bone white breathes the fear of being,
the frustration of seeming unequal to white.
White portraits on white walls signify ownership of all,
even as white walls white in.
The early section “liminal spaces: i,” presenting Rankine’s eyewitness reporting from airports and on board aircraft, carries an inherent electric charge. Rankine can feel her body, a dark-skinned black woman’s, residing on the opposite side of a spectrum of perceived social currency from that of white businessmen, with whom she has exchanges ranging from awkward to painful to promising. “Have you ever considered your own white privilege, or your son’s?” Rankine asks one man, a fellow academic, during a friendly dialogue on college admissions. As with many of Rankine’s conversational partners, his reaction is circuitous, standardized, evasive. Another man’s response to Rankine’s questioning his philosophy of “not seeing color” reveals the beginnings of a shift in awareness: “What other inane things have I said?”
But one revelation here, and one which makes Just Us a satisfyingly different read from Citizen, is that Rankine, despite her seriousness, is not without humor. Watching a cadre of white businessmen cut in line at the airport, she and a white man share a laugh when she says: “Now that is the height of white male privilege.” It’s a surprising moment, and suggests a path forward in social relations; both she and the white man are in on the joke—and in on the acknowledgment of wider realities. She has momentarily detached this white man from his own whiteness to examine the phenomenon of social currency and power. It’s such small moments, she implies, that form crucial cracks in what Audre Lorde called the master’s house.
That said, Rankine is persistently focused, well-nigh fixated, on the seeming intractability of many social dynamics. (Given all the available documentation of state-sanctioned murder, which occurs in a pervasive atmosphere of implicit racial bias, her pessimism resonates.) Reading passages of this book aloud with a white friend, I noted that Rankine can be monofocal on black-white relations and is somewhat a product of her generation in seeing these social dynamics as starkly defined and immovable. But here, too, Rankine is ahead of us. Her fixation on black-white relations is a habit she acknowledges later in the book, as she considers her relationship with the Latinx community and ponders her own shortcomings. (Besides, as she proves in Just Us, her focus is well-founded, since anti-blackness often underlies less stark forms of hierarchy.) Anatomizing human behavior with at times forensic detachment, Rankine spares no one, herself included.
Just Us sustains its wry humor. In “complicit freedoms,” a well-researched meditation on blondness, Rankine considers how blond-dyed hair allowed persecuted Italian and Irish immigrants to transition closer to more socially acceptable forms of whiteness: “I suppose if all I had to do was bleach my hair blond to stop white supremacists from wanting to burn crosses in my yard, I might consider blondness myself.” Then it’s back to pointed observations: “Certainly the forty-fifth president and his family understand the importance of the blond signifier in their campaign to Make America Great Again.” Not confining her observation to right-wing politicians, Rankine notes how Hillary Clinton, once a brunette, went and stayed blond when entering public life. Here as elsewhere, Rankine distills the significance. Following her conversation with a cashier who says men (and women) treat her better as a blonde, she wonders: “Is civility what’s being chased, the civility that’s owed to white purity?”
We also see the effectiveness of Rankine’s visual approach. Typically, her own text appears on the right page, while reserving the left page for primary sources, ranging from demographic charts of voting habits to photographs like that of a 1925 Klan march in Washington. Screen captures of memes and online exchanges make us feel as if we’ve melded with the vast mind of the information superhighway, via Rankine’s own roving, restless curiosity. “It’s difficult to be hopeful when even the ‘eye gaze patterns’ of teachers in pre-school tend to target black children, especially boys, at the sign of any disturbance in the classroom,” Rankine says. “One wonders how this could not become a social cue for all the children.” The facing page excerpts a 2016 study by the Yale Child Center of Early Education showing how such data was collected, using videos of elementary school classrooms. Like Ta-Nehisi Coates, Rankine wants to back up contentions with inarguable hard evidence, a slap in the face to the post-fact ethos of Trump.
This intertextual approach accounts, too, for much sly humor. Opposite one page of her meditation on blondeness, Rankine visually enlarges the advisory-safety warnings of hair dye, allowing it to painfully and hilariously to speak for itself (“THIS PRODUCT MUST NOT BE USED FOR DYING THE EYELASHES OR EYEBROWS; TO DO SO MAY CAUSE BLINDNESS”), as does a formidable list of chemical ingredients including Ammonium Hydroxide, Oleic Acid, and Droxyethyl-P-Phenylenediamine, reading like a dystopian effusion in the genre of hysterical realism.
“Perhaps ‘blond hair is better’ and ‘black is beautiful’ are both forms of insistence,” Rankine suggests, “with the latter refusing to take hold in the public imagination because of racism… I don’t know. I’m simply exploring and not insisting.” Hence, the proliferation of questions. “The reality would floor me if it weren’t ordinary,” she states while examining global anti-blackness, pondering how the Japanese mother of tennis phenomenon Naomi Osaka was estranged for fifteen years from her parents for loving a Haitian man. In Just Us, Rankine floors us with the ordinary, finds our tender bruises, presses them, and shows us we can take the pain. In doing so, she implies an answer to the question of healing.
