This Is Us
Just Human
Black stories are most rewarded when they center blackness — which, in a certain sense, is to center whiteness
It is a cool autumn morning and I am perched on my couch, a coffee cup nearby, a few pages into Claudia Rankine’s newest book, Just Us: An American Conversation. My 14-year-old son saunters in and asks what I am reading when I look up over the brim to tell him: “It’s a book on race by an author I met last summer during my writing residency.” “Is it good?” he asks. “It’s interesting,” I say. “But sometimes I get tired of reading about racism.” “Why… because it makes you angry?” he asks. “Angry is not the right word. Annoyed. Yes… annoyed that she took 300 pages to reflect on what White people think of us. Who cares?”
The book details Rankine’s various experiences with blackness, whiteness, and the ways in which the two collide and integrate throughout her life, work, and friendships. This work and others like it are necessary in a post-slavery country where, far too often, White people forget that the systemic effects of slavery are still alive and well: in education, in professional life, and in daily interactions between humans, whether they’re the same race or not. Early in the book, Rankine comments on a truth she has accepted about the “culture of whiteness”: “The lack…
