Just Us: An American Conversation by Claudia Rankine

Claudia Rankine’s Just Us: An American Conversation focuses on the performance of race and racism in the current American political climate. This powerful work of nonfiction utilizes conversations with everyday people combined with interviews with celebrities, politicians, scholars, and journalists to explore how race exists, manifesting itself in different forms and contexts.

Rankine’s book is divided into twelve chapters, each dealing with a different facet of race relations today, from the legacy of slavery to whiteness and police brutality. Throughout each chapter, Rankine provides avenues to help readers grapple with their own position in the racial landscape. Her book is an urgent call for a deeper understanding of the nation’s racial history, and how it shapes contemporary racial discourse.

The first chapter, “Our History”, focuses on how the history of marginalization impacts the present. Rankine highlights the need to deconstruct institutional racism, which she defines as a “systemic, ongoing, and insidious process of delegitimizing, exploiting, and oppressing people of color”. She recounts an array of stories that provide an insight into how such acts occur. Rankine particularly emphasizes the plight of black lives, such as that of Trayvon Martin, the black teenager who was shot by George Zimmerman in 2012.

Rankine uses these stories to grapple with the implications of racism in America. From her conversations, Rankine discovers that too often individuals' racial experiences are reduced to mere binaries—sane or irrational, right or wrong, white or black. Rankine seeks to confront the limitations of such labels and contend with the idea of ‘just us’. That is, the notion that we all share in the collective experience of being American, despite our diverse backgrounds.

This ‘just us’ understanding manifests itself in Rankine’s take on police brutality, which she calls a “systemic failure of accountability”. By presenting interviews with people affected by police violence, including activists, family members of victims, lawyers, and academics, Rankine paints a vivid picture of modern-day America. She reveals that the perpetrators of police brutality are often armed with the privilege of power, allowing them to act with impunity.

The following chapters continue to interrogate various topics, including civil rights, interrogations, racial justice, and representation in the media. Each chapter dives deep into Rankine’s conversations, providing readers with insight into the daily lived experience of many Americans. She speaks to her own experiences of racism, and of “being the person to lighten the mood in a space that is already full of difficult dialogues”.

Finally, Rankine’s “Postscript” chapter serves as a call to action, urging readers to listen intently, get involved in the conversation, and become advocates of change. In doing so, Just Us provides a roadmap to progress in confronting racism in today’s America.

By giving readers a window into her own conversations around race, Claudia Rankine provides an invaluable service to the contemporary American dialogue. Drawing from multiple perspectives, she dismantles systems of thought that perpetuate oppressive structures and resist the idea of a “just us”. Just Us: An American Conversation is a powerful piece of nonfiction and an important contribution to the project of addressing racism in our nation.