Just Us ★★★★☆

Just Us (Click Here to Buy)

★★★★☆

Just Us is a collection of poetry and essays by Claudia Rankine

The book is about addressing whiteness - what whiteness means, what forms whiteness can take, how we can have the conversation about whiteness, how we can sit with whiteness and not look away. Rankine takes these considerations through thoughts, conversations, articles, and documents. Rankine forces readers to have the conversation, and to never look away.

I read this book on Kindle, but I would recommend reading it in book form. I would not recommend this as an audiobook. The reason is that Just Us is so much more than words on a page. Rankine is a poet and uses a variety of forms from paragraph to poetry to image to table/graph in each chapter. I appreciate this variety, it is a welcome launch from a typical book. The photos, notes, etc. invite the reader to pause and sit with the material. These snippets also helped me learn a lot - from Shirley Cards to white walls in art spaces - so much around us has been touched by whiteness and according to Rankine, it’s time to talk about that.

My favorite chapters were liminal spaces and complicit freedoms. In liminal spaces, Rankine writes about her experience of talking to white men as strangers in airports about their privilege. In complicit freedoms, Rankine explores blondness in relation to whiteness. If anyone has read the book or watched the show Big Little Lies, there is a chapter about that as well. I really enjoyed when Rankine would talk about a situation that happened with someone and then that someone would later write what they thought about what happened as well. The book is very well researched and each chapter is accompanied with footnotes that cite articles and interviews worth following up on.

I have also read The White Card by Rankine, which is a play that takes place in the form of a conversation about race - specifically white and black - at a dinner party. I recently purchased Citizen: An American Lyric by Rankine and will likely read it this year.

If you liked Just Us, I also recommend Hood Feminism by Mikki Kendall, Talking to Strangers by Malcolm Gladwell (I recommend the audiobook), The Ferguson Report by The U.S. Department of Justice, and So You Want To Talk About Race by Ijeoma Oluo.

Happy Reading,

Ms.Bjork

P.S. Fun Fact: Rankine’s birthday is January 1st! (Happy Belated)