I read this immediately after reading the chapter on the KKK in Eric Foner's Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution 1863-1877, and this was an excellent follow-up to that despair. Not that Just Us is reassuring, exactly, or soothing, at all. It is more "the progress we have yet to make" than "the progress we have made," but still.

Maybe it's that this is something I can do something about? Not something removed from me by 150 years of history, but something I can engage with now. Because this book is a call to engage with whiteness.

While Rankine doesn't engage (exactly) the "look at all the white people behaving badly in this book, I do not do those things, look at how much closer I am to good already," she DOES directly engage the other big white response to books/workshops/etc. on race: "look, I took the white emotional roller coaster, I felt big things, and it was big work and I have DONE SOMETHING and I can rest now."

If there is a central thesis to this book it is that there is no one big action we can take and all be done with racism now. That it never should be about making people comfortable (especially white people), because it is inherently messy. There is no knowing/understanding/addressing it entire. That it's being able to exist in the conversation in discomfort, to do the close reading without knowing the answers, or even where the answers may take us. That there can't be one answer, but only done one by one, poem by poem, text by text, person by person. ( )

https://shawjonathan.com/2022/09/05/claudia-rankines-just-us/ ( )

This book gave me new perspectives and some new insights on race problems in the USA and the world. It warrants a second read from me later this year. ( )

Despite agreeing with most everything in the book, I never fully engaged with it, and I suspect the distracting format played a part in that. Oddly, the text of the book is printed only on the right-hand page of each two-page spread. The left-hand page is reserved for photos, graphs, fact checks, notes on the text's sources, or, many times, it's just blank. The photos sometimes seemed a bit too random or dull, with a chapter about air travel offering bland shots out a plane window or passengers sitting in airports and another about hair giving way too many close-ups of dyed-blond locks. Still, at a certain point in the book, I found myself anticipating the left page more than the right, with its tantalizing social media posts and the original sources taking me down mental side roads more interesting than the occasionally too deeply introspective and too poetic main narrative. ( )

Throughout this year I've read or listened to many different books on race, relationship, history, biases but this book had a bigger impact on me than all those others. The inside cover of the book jacket states, that the author invites us into a necessary conversation about whiteness in America, and indeed that is exactly what the book provided. A black woman married to a white man, with friends from both races, I found her viewpoint unique. She questions reactions, even her own to various experiences, thoughts and as a mother concerned about her daughter and her daughter's future. She made me think, see things I've never even thought implied racism and shows how complicated and twisted, the racial divide is, once again rearing it's ugly head under the current administration. Or more likely it's always been there but now once again brought into the open.

She is a professor of poetry at Yale and this books style is telling as it reads sometimes like poetry. It includes a poem, illustrations, examples, some history and a chapter on blondness that I found fascinating. She doesn't lecture, her purpose is to make us question what we take for granted, what we see and don't see and I felt this, at least for me, is what she accomplished. A special, eye opening book, one I hope many read. ( )