I’m judging the L.A. Times 2020 and 2021 fiction contest. It’d be generous to call what I’m doing upon my first cursory glance—reading. I also don’t take this task lightly. As a fellow writer and lover of words and books, I took this position—in hopes of being a good literary citizen. My heart aches for all the writers who have a debut at this time. What I can share now is the thing that held my attention and got me to read on even though it was among 296 other books I’m charged to read.

Despite being assigned to read 296 novels, I was drawn to this publication due to Rankine’s brilliance. I needed to hear her voice amidst all the chaos.

I know Claudia Rankine primarily as a poet and came into this book thinking it would be more poetry. While there is a little poetry, it is largely essays examining racism in America. Rankine is also a college professor bringing a great deal of personal experience and gravitas to these essays. She uses multimedia and footnotes to enhance everything.

After getting past my initial surprise at the format, I found the book compelling and informative, particularly with the very personal nature of these essays. Rankine always kept them grounded in her own experiences, which was refreshing compared to some other collections this book is in conversation with.

My BookPage review: https://bookpage.com/reviews/25438-claudia-rankine-just-us-nonfiction#.YDaoQC1h2YU


Mixing essays, poetry and images, Claudia Rankine’s new book, Just Us: An American Conversation, asks how our notions of whiteness play out in these United States. In the book’s meditative opening poem, she asks what if: “What if what I want from you is new, newly made / a new sentence in response to all my questions. . . . I am here, without the shrug, / attempting to understand how what I want / and what I want from you run parallel— / justice and the openings for just us.”

The compelling essay “liminal spaces” comes early in the book. “The running comment in our current political climate is that we all need to converse with people we don’t normally speak to,” she writes. Rankine is a Black woman, and though her husband is white, she says, “I found myself falling into easy banter with all kinds of strangers except white men. They rarely sought me out to shoot the breeze, and I did not seek them out. Maybe it was time to engage, even if my fantasies of these encounters seemed outlandish. I wanted to try.” A frequent flyer, Rankine finds these men in line for flights or sits next to them on airplanes. In Just Us, she details their exchanges alongside her private thoughts.

If Rankine’s essays are wide-ranging (blondness, police violence, Latinx stereotypes) and well researched, they’re also conversational and personal. Images run throughout the text, including photo essays, screenshots of tweets from Roxane Gay and Donald Trump and frequent side notes, in which Rankine fact-checks her own assumptions. These images and asides expand on the essays while offering a glimpse into Rankine’s process as a writer.

Rankine is best known as a poet. She’s the author of five poetry collections, including the book-length poem Citizen (2014), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award. She’s also written three plays and many essays and reviews, and she used her MacArthur “genius” grant to found the Racial Imaginary Institute, which sponsors artists responding to concepts of whiteness and Blackness. She is one of our foremost thinkers, and Just Us is essential reading in 2020 and beyond.

Claudia Rankine has done it again! Her newest work is a searing commentary on the racialized world we live in. I can't get enough of her words. I want to read her thoughts again and again.

Interesting format and ideas. This is not a quick read, but a book to take your time with and absorb.

A beautiful, difficult collection where Rankine explores different narrative forms, from poetry to footnoted research. I love the mixture of personal reflection, storytelling, beautiful prose and verse, and cultural critique. We are so lucky that Rankine shares her thoughts and experiences in such a lyrical, unflinching way.

Whew, this book is just what I needed in 2020. Always timely and always vital. I love Claudia Rankine.

Recommended reading for anyone interested in politics and race and whiteness in America. I love the way Rankine uses visuals, poetry, prose, news, and media together for this book. I love Rankine's curiosity. Her ability to write succinctly and profoundly and simply about extremely complex concepts and the present day zeitgeist makes me SO envious. She makes her writing appear effortless in that's so digestible and engaging to read. Time doesn't exist for me when I'm in it. There were many instances through out the book where I thought, "I'd never been able to put that into words, but YES, exactly what you're talking about here. Yes!" Rankine is open eyed and aware and vulnerable and doesn't miss much of anything. I'm not sure the world deserves her wisdom or empathy but we are lucky to have it.

Highly, highly recommended. There are few books I've read this year that feel this perfectly "of the moment" yet also timeless at a fundamental level. I can't explain it. Read this booooook.

Thank you to #NetGalley and Graywolf Press for providing me a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Such a timely and important book that everyone should read! I love how the author chose to use a variety of essays and poems along with research to help others learn about racism and white supremacy. Thank you to NetGalley and Graywolf Press for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Eye-opening book with lots of varied viewpoints on issues that are ever present in our society. Loved the poetry, essays, and other tidbits that Rankine included in this unique book.

Claudia Rankine owns her rank as one of the most brilliant minds to ever grace this planet. Her latest and largest masterwork, Just Us, raises all the pressing unanswered inquiries on white male privilege I’ve yet to unpack myself, and the fruits of her research here could nourish and sustain a generation of hopeless youth, myself among them. By turns vulnerable and soul-baring, Just Us pries deeply into the underbelly of white supremacy, white fragility, and explores the painful depths to which Black Americans must go to undo generations of social and racial conditioning—to defuse the ticking bomb of what feels like imminent self-destruction. I would follow Rankine to the edge of the world.

Claudia Rankine is phenomenal with words. I read her work Citizen: An American Lyric earlier this year and when I learned about Just Us: An American Conversation I knew I had to get my hands on it as soon as I could. This work of art was impeccably put together, complete with photos, fact checks, and sources in line with the text. I applaud the amount of work that went into putting this together. The personal anecdotes and thoughts that Rankine documents in these pages will stay with you long after you finish reading. I will treasure this breathtaking piece of writing.

"Among white people, black people are allowed to talk about their precarious lives, but they are not allowed to implicate the present company...to create discomfort by pointing out the facts is seen as socially unacceptable. Let's get over ourselves, it's structural not personal...."

In Just Us, Claudia Rankine pokes into areas of discomfort surrounding issues of race - in airplane lines and dinner parties, friendships and theater audiences, meet the teacher night and discussions on hair color. She calls up white friends/colleagues to try to understand how they are seeing or experiencing differently. She doesn't play nice during a faculty dinner. She documents the places where she fact checks her own statements. She does not provide easy answers, she is instead modeling the kinds of conversations we need to be able to have with one another if we are to move forward.

There is some poetic language in this volume, but I feel like it is much more essay focused than Citizen: An American Lyric.

One thing I appreciate about Claudia Rankine is her thoughtfulness, the way she pauses and considers what she thinks and why she thinks it. I was really reminded of this in the panel she participated in at the Brooklyn Book Festival.

Claudia Rankine is dedicated to understanding racism in America and to do that, she needs to understand how white people view race in America. Just Us (along with Citizen) is required reading for anyone interested in understanding the role they play in perpetuating race inequality in this country. Using plain language and many concrete examples drawn from the news and from her personal life, she helps the reader develop a broad understanding of this multi-layered problem.

This is a brilliant inquiry into anti-Black racism in the United States. Claudia Rankine has produced both a formally brilliant and timely book, and the integration of research alongside her personal essays and poetry was seamless. Would highly recommend.

I'm grateful to Graywolf Press for allowing me to access an ARC of this beautiful and timely book via NetGalley.

I love Claudia Rankine's mind and her writing. I have not made it through her play, but Citizen was a revelation and full of the confident scholarship that is also evidenced in Just Us. There is lots of data and anecdotal evidence of the many aspects of white supremacy and what Isabel Wilkerson would rightfully frame as caste at work in Rankine's daily interactions. The statistics and data about everything from the signifiers of whiteness by way of blond hair to the disproportionate disciplinary actions of teachers (mainly white at all levels of education) regarding black students; anti-black racism among Asians and Asian Americans as reflected in coverage of Naomi Osaka; the origins of Barbie in Germany and more are all fascinating. This feels a little less like a revelation than Citizen but I don't know why, exactly -- I was reading it digitally which changed the reading experience and I had to scroll down to skip over breaks and pictures and excerpts to come in the text, so that may have contributed to feeling a little like there wasn't exactly a cohesive narrative arc here.


https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/3552525059

This book was quite possibly the most important book I've ever read, certainly the most important I've read this year. I intend to use sections of this to juxtapose readings in my introductory writing class / to assign the full text in future creative nonfiction writing workshops.

An absolute perfect follow up to 'Citizen.' Rankine moves away from the earlier poetry and essay combo to focus mostly on the essay form here. The ideas are presented in fresh ways with beautiful prose.

This book by the renowned Claudia Rankine is an in-depth look at whiteness and racism at the current time. It is a collection of poetry and essays that spell out her thoughts in a compelling and thoughtful manner that ask the reader to rethink their current notions.

Although I loved the book, the format in which NetGalley released it as an ANC was very difficult for me to read. Most of the books that I receive are forwarded to my kindle, and make reading easy. I do not do well reading on my computer, and the only choice was to read it on Adobe. It made reading quite cumbersome.

This is such a powerful book! Rankine uses multiple genres (poetry, essays and various types of images) to bring readers into the discussion surrounding whiteness and white supremacy. She is able to incorporate facts within each genre that leaves the reader with a lot to think about. A must read for all!

Thank you to NetGalley and Graywolf for the eARC of this genre-bending and important book.
The subtitle of Just Us is An American Conversation, and it is striking that Rankine builds this book out of fairly simple and everyday events and conversations, some of which she actively seeks out, some which happen to her, and others which simply happen in a space near her.
One of the earliest events in Just Us, and a good example of how this book will work (for there don’t seem to be too many specific examples of books that work on the reader in the way that this one does), involves a white man stepping in front of Rankine in a first-class line to get on an airplane. The man gets behind her, but says to a white male companion, “You never know who they’re letting into first class these days.” Within the space of Just Us, rather than express an unutterable rage that might have (and maybe did?) overcome her in the moment, Rankine interrogates her reaction, explores possible reasons for the white man’s actions and why he may have said what he said. She also includes pictures from the plane of her line-cutter, and, on the left-hand side the page, captures a social media post of a Black person who recounts a very similar experience. The personal is universal. These are not isolated incidents. This is the structure of our country.
Rankine’s book continues on in this way: fair-minded, inquisitive, unstinting. Throughout, she uses the left-hand page to fact-check herself and others. She recounts conversations with white friends, and allows her friends to read her essay to get a reaction. One even writes a heady response that is included here.
There is so much that makes up Just Us. So much that requires great thought, and perhaps even greater action. Just Us is truly an important addition to this American Conversation