Just Us: An American Conversation

“They couldn’t know what it’s like to be me, though who I am is in part a response to who they are, and I didn’t really believe I understood them, even as they determined so much of what was possible in my life and in the lives of others.” 

Rankine continues to reflect on her social position in relation to that of the white men who wait in airport business lounges with her. Her subjectivity is invisible to them, but the way in which she is understood socially is relative to their positions as privileged members of society, which is predicated on her exclusion from this privilege. Still, Rankine is determined to understand them personally and to understand how their privilege relates to their personal lives.

“The outrage—and if we are generous, the embarrassment that occasioned the white passenger’s comment—was a reaction to the unseen taking up space; space itself is one of the understood privileges of whiteness.” 

Rankine thinks about a white male passenger who questioned her place in the first-class cabin. She is the “unseen,” who is taking a place that, in his mind, is supposed to go to a white person. Rankine considers here how many white people often presume that places of privilege, whether it is a seat in a first-class cabin or a place in Yale University’s first-year class, reflexively belong to them.

“These phrases—white fragility, white defensiveness, white appropriation—have a habit of standing in for the complicated mess of a true conversation.” 

Rankine contemplates the lexicon of critical race theory, which is intended to help us understand how we are each interpellated within a white supremacist, patriarchal system. However, Rankine wonders if these terms, which are academic, and which many white people perceive as hostile, might stand in the way of constructive conversations.

“The lack of an integrated life meant that no part of his life recognized the treatment of black people as an important disturbance. To not remember is perhaps not to feel touched by events that don’t interfere with your livelihood. This is the reality that defines white privilege no matter how much money one has or doesn’t have.” 

Rankine thinks about another white man whom she met on a plane. He is a progressive who grew up in a middle-class Northeastern suburb and claimed that he didn’t see color. Rankine, who challenged him on the notion of not seeing color, realizes that his upbringing in an almost uniformly white world meant that he never had to think about how Black people might have been impacted by his comfortable insularity, even in instances when he observed the few Black people present as victims of racism. Rankine concludes that the same would have been true if the white man had grown up in a lower-income community or a rural area or even one that was more integrated. Whiteness protects white people from thinking about how others might suffer as a result of their protected institutional and social powers.

“If white people keep forgetting to remember that black lives matter, as they clearly do given their acceptance of everything from racist comments by friends and colleagues to the lack of sentencing of most police officers who kill unarmed blacks, to more structural racist practices, then they will always be surprised when those memories take hold.” 

Rankine invokes the slogan associated by the activist group of the same name, which led the world in protests that questioned police powers and the treatment of disenfranchised groups in the summer of 2020. She also mentions forgetfulness—a habit that is critical to the maintenance of white supremacy—to understand how white people who have witnessed racism, and even participated in it, can feign surprise about racism in a society that has always been rife with examples.

“There is something to be said for staying alongside in our sobering reality. Some realities aren’t funny. They are made up of truths more vital than laughable no matter how much or how little time you have.” 

Rankine concludes the chapter “lemonade,” about her contemplation of her interracial relationship, on this note. She had considered leaving her husband, John, in favor of a possible someone who would have made her laugh. She decides that there is something invaluable in her connection with a man who at least tries to understand her condition—both racial and existential.

“There are other words too: hoses, dogs, genocide, incarceration, assassination, wall, immigration, Can I help you? Why are you here? Do you live here? Can I see your ID? Is this your house? Is she your wife? Inside the shape of the woman is there a woman? As I am being human am I a human being?” 

Rankine is thinking about photographer Paul Graham’s photo Woman with Arms Outstretched. She thinks about all of the signifiers, even photographs, that can render Black people invisible and non-existent as subjects. She includes words that indicate the ways in which American society has attempted to exclude Black people from citizenship, the questions that passive-aggressively reinforce this insistence upon exclusion. Rankine concludes with a question that is somewhat of a palindrome. Its purpose is to assert her humanity while also questioning the ability of others to see her as equally and wholly human.

“Knowing that the DNA of whiteness includes defending itself from my knowledge of our shared history to the point of becoming ahistorical and framing everything economically or universally as if that erases racism, what would, what could they say?” 

Rankine is at a PTA meeting. She quietly wonders how the white teachers imagine her. She is the mother of a biracial daughter. Their awareness of this cannot help but point to the “shared history” of enslaved women giving birth to the children of white slave masters and suckling those born to white mistresses. To avoid acknowledgement of this shared history, it becomes necessary to say that slavery was purely about economics, or to argue that all civilizations practice slavery and other forms of oppression to avoid dealing with a unique and specific context.

“The inability of white people to see children other than white children as children is a reality that frankly leaves one hopeless about a change in attitudes regarding the perceived humanity of black people.” 

While thinking about the refusal of white parents in gentrified Harlem to accept Black and brown children to predominately white schools (an issue that Rankine juxtaposes with a photo of Elizabeth Eckford attempting to attend Little Rock High School in 1957), Rankine notes that racism prevents white people from seeing Black children as they would see their own. Unable to recognize the vulnerability of children, Rankine decides, makes her hopeless about white society’s ability to recognize that of any other Black person.

“Murdered, assassinated, incarcerated, or abandoned black people are an acceptable loss for many white Americans. And though more blacks are killed in neighborhood crimes, those killed or incarcerated by whites often seem targeted simply because of the color of their skin, since the outcome of those interactions often results in anything from over-sentencing to death.” 

Rankine mentions the relative indifference with which whites hear stories about Black people disappearing, either into prisons or into coffins. Though she doesn’t state it explicitly, this indifference exists in relation to the immense concern that is often heaped on white families after a white person’s life is extinguished (this is especially true in cases in which young, attractive white women go missing). As though she is prepared for racist mentions of “black-on-black” crime, Rankine acknowledges the intra-racial crimes in Black communities, which also exist in other racial communities, but notes that Black people who are killed by whites are usually killed specifically because they are Black. This is also true when Black people face sentencing.

“The indifference is impenetrable and reliable and distributed across centuries, and I am stupidly hurt when my friends can’t see that. Perhaps that’s my nonwhite fragility.”

Rankine tries to give this indifference, which feels like a void, some texture. It is what stands between her and white people, even those who are friends and colleagues. This indifference is also, sadly, the one thing that she can always be certain about in their interactions. She describes her inability to come to terms with this as “nonwhite fragility”—a play on Robin DiAngelo’s “white fragility.” Rankine’s ironic twist seems to critique white people who have balked at DiAngelo’s term, which is also a behavior that reinforces Rankine’s understanding of what she terms indifference.

“That the laws favor him as a white male must remain a known unknown. He cannot bear to know it and know that he accommodates and makes visible all that has been redirected toward him. He cannot bear the burden of what was taken to be given to him. He cannot know himself as the embodied space of privilege even as he becomes its evidence. He will not know himself as the favored even as he destroys others in order not to know. Even as person after person lives dependent on him, waiting for him, looking to him to know what he cannot—or is it will not?—know.” 

Rankine reacts to Plainfield, Indiana, police captain, Scott Arndt, declaring that another police captain’s mention of his white privilege was extremely offensive. Rankine emphasizes the willful ignorance in which white people like Arndt force themselves to live so that they can enjoy their privileges without thinking about what those privileges have cost. In her analysis of this thinking, Rankine constructs a mental cul-de-sac in which Arndt and other white men like him feign ignorance of something that they not only know but have internalized as fact. This is a subtle nod at the hypocrisy which maintains white supremacy.

“Whiteness wants the kind of progress that reflects what it values, a reflection of itself.” 

Rankine thinks back on actress Eartha Kitt’s visit to a White House luncheon. Her confrontation with President Lyndon Johnson and Lady Bird Johnson over Vietnam resulted in her being blacklisted from the White House. President Johnson, a Democrat, is regarded as a progressive president, particularly due to his Great Society program and his signatures of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. This progress, Rankine posits, did not come without the expectation that Black people, once integrated, would assimilate into white society, and embrace white supremacist and capitalist values.

“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.” 

Rankine is at a dinner party among white people. She purposely stays silent during a conversation about whether a child study center located in a Black community ought to omit the word “study” from its title. Rankine thinks about all of the nefarious “studies” that have been conducted on Black people in the name of science, but she says nothing. She knows that making them aware of this history, or reminding them of it, would make them uncomfortable because she could not talk about it without reminding them of their own collusion with the racism that permitted it.

“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.” 

After watching the TV show, Big Little Lies, Rankine makes the mistake of placing herself in the same class as a white woman friend at a similar economic level. However, Rankine knows that her comforts, even her house, are not as secure as those of her white friend. This means that, despite Rankine’s level of achievement, and all the accoutrement that signal her success, she is not insulated from a racist system that is predicated on her deprivation as a default standard.

“Just us, just people, the same people, but what is it that the just people are feeling or wanting or being? The brouhaha so brutal, rising, rising up, rise up.”

Rankine interjects with this thought while transcribing several 911 calls that white people have made to complain about the presence of Black people in spaces in which they did not want to see a Black person. Rankine’s reiteration of the book’s title in this passage is meant to point to the innocuousness of these Black presences which the white callers refuse to perceive as anything but threats. This collision of Black and white people in spaces that for so long were reserved only for whites, in addition to the existence of a virulently racist white president, is resurrecting expressions of white supremacy that had been long dormant in social spaces.

“Then the black person is asked to leave to vacate to prove to validate to confirm to authorize to legalize their right to be in the air in air in here and then the police help help is called help help the police is called the police help help.” 

In this passage, in which Rankine eschews grammar and proper punctuation to signal the exhaustive requirements that Black people endure as a result of white supremacy’s inability to tolerate their existences as anything other than property. The word “help,” a signal of the hysteria of white 911 callers using the police to enforce white supremacy, becomes a call for Black citizens to be heard, to be respected, to have their right to exist respected.

“The police they believe the police believe the president the history the education the media what entertainment taught them the world they know the worst they carry.” 

Rankine continues in the hysterical tone of the last passage. She depicts how politics, a racist president, historiography, education, and the media have contributed to false ideas about Black people, particularly that they do not belong in certain spaces (a notion reinforced by their virtual invisibility in programming about upper middle-class whites) and that they are criminal.

“For me, people of color means ‘not structurally white,’ as in not a part of the structural power across institutions that want others dead or disenfranchised or deported or made invisible to white lives through voter suppression or passive or aggressive legislative defunding and criminalizing of certain segments of the population based both on race and ethnicity.” 

Rankine includes Asians and all Latin peoples under the rubric “people of color.” However, she realizes that some members of these communities do not feel this sense of solidarity with her. Others still are eager to distance themselves from Blackness to avoid being associated with members of a social underclass.

“Perhaps words are like rooms; they have to make room for people. Dude, I am here. We are here. You are here. She is here. They are here. He is here. We live here too. He eats here too. She walks here too. He waits here too. They sleep here too. Dude! Come on. Come on.” 

Rankine compares language to space, allowing for inclusion and plurality. Her repetition of the word “here” establishes the presences of those whom others wish to banish. Her use of the adjective “too” reinforces her emphasis on inclusion. “Come on” is both a command to jolt the reader out of their narrow-mindedness and to implore us to join everyone else in creating spaces in which everyone can belong.

“I have watched white people reduce black people not to a single black person but to a single imagined black person, imagined animal, imagined thing, imagined ignoramus, imagined depravity, imagined criminality, imagined aggressor, superpredator, imagined whore, imagined poverty queen, imagined babymaker, imagined inferior being in need of everything belonging to white people including air and water and on and on toward an imagined no one.” 

While thinking about the ways in which white people have objectified Black people, Rankine places herself as the subject of this sentence—an observer of those who assert the rights to observe and cast judgment. She enumerates all of the stereotypes that have been cast on Black people. Ideas about them as animals and ignoramuses conjure up the excerpts that Rankine includes from Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on Virginia, in addition to stereotypes that proliferated during the antebellum and postbellum eras, allowing for the creation of blackface caricatures on the American stage. All of these stereotypes, including more contemporary notions of Black men and boys as “superpredators,” and Black women as “welfare queens” are intended to reify the sense that Black people are undeserving of resources and attention, despite being citizens, taxpayers, and human beings.

“Their culture made us, and as wrong or as right as we can be, we know someone is always looking.” 

Rankine is thinking about a Black woman’s choice to dye her hair blond, and wonders if this act challenges notions of white supremacy or buttresses them. She posits that Black people are undeniably products of a white supremacist system, which makes them subject to its standards, whether they wish to be or not. The sense that “someone is always looking” is a reference to the white gaze, which has long declared Black women less attractive than white ones.

“In a country that has traded so overtly in white superiority and white purity, perhaps white women are trapped inside the machinery that insists on the authenticity of whiteness.”

Rankine continues to think about blondeness, now considering the pressure on white women to bear the hair color, which represents a racial ideal. She suggests that white women, too, are oppressed within a white supremacist system that uses them to enforce an ideal that they must manufacture to retain their statuses as white women.