Just Us Read online

  NOTE TO THE READER

  The print edition of Just Us: An American Conversation is designed to be read in two-page spreads, with the primary text on the right, and notes, sources, fact-checking commentary, and images on the left. For the ebook, the notes, sources, and fact-checking commentary have been converted into linked notes that appear at the end of each section. Images have been integrated into the text, unless they are intrinsically linked to a note or source.

  JUST US

  ALSO BY CLAUDIA RANKINE

  Poetry

  Citizen: An American Lyric

  Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric

  Plot

  The End of the Alphabet

  Nothing in Nature Is Private

  Plays

  Help

  The White Card

  The Provenance of Beauty: A South Bronx Travelogue

  Coeditor

  The Racial Imaginary

  American Poets in the 21st Century

  American Women Poets in the 21st Century

  JUST US

  AN AMERICAN CONVERSATION

  CLAUDIA RANKINE

  Graywolf Press

  Copyright © 2020 by Claudia Rankine

  Permission acknowledgments appear on pp. 337–339.

  The author and Graywolf Press have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify Graywolf Press at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.

  This publication is made possible, in part, by the voters of Minnesota through a Minnesota State Arts Board Operating Support grant, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund. Significant support has also been provided by Target, the McKnight Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, the Amazon Literary Partnership, and other generous contributions from foundations, corporations, and individuals. To these organizations and individuals we offer our heartfelt thanks.

  Published by Graywolf Press

  250 Third Avenue North, Suite 600

  Minneapolis, Minnesota 55401

  All rights reserved.

  www.graywolfpress.org

  Published in the United States of America

  Printed in Canada

  ISBN 978-1-64445-021-5

  Ebook ISBN 978-1-64445-119-9

  2 4 6 8 9 7 5 3 1

  First Graywolf Printing, 2020

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2019956891

  Jacket design: John Lucas

  Jacket art © Nona Faustine

  You go down there looking for justice, that’s what you find, just us.

  Richard Pryor

  For Us

  contents

  what if

  liminal spaces i

  evolution

  lemonade

  outstretched

  daughter

  notes on the state of whiteness

  tiki torches

  study on white male privilege

  tall

  social contract

  violent

  sound and fury

  big little lies

  ethical loneliness

  liminal spaces ii

  josé martí

  boys will be boys

  complicit freedoms

  whitening

  liminal spaces iii

  JUST US

  what if

  i

  What does it mean to want

  an age- old call

  for change

  not to change

  and yet, also,

  to feel bullied

  by the call to change?

  How is a call to change named shame,

  named penance, named chastisement?

  How does one say

  what if

  without reproach? The root

  of chastise is to make pure.

  The impossibility of that—is that

  what repels and not

  the call for change?

  ii

  There is resignation in my voice when I say I feel

  myself slowing down, gauging like a machine

  the levels of my response. I remain within

  so sore I think there is no other way than release—

  so I ask questions like I know how

  in the loneliness of my questioning.

  What’s still is true; there isn’t even a tremor

  when one is this historied out.

  I could build a container to carry this being,

  a container to hold all, though we were never

  about completeness; we were never to be whole.

  I stand in your considered thoughts also broken,

  also unknown, extending

  one sentence—here, I am here.

  As I’ve known you, as I’ll never know you,

  I am here. Whatever is

  being expressed, what if,

  I am here awaiting, waiting for you

  in the what if, in the questions,

  in the conditionals,

  in the imperatives—what if.

  iii

  What if over tea, what if on our walks, what if

  in the long yawn of the fog, what if in the long middle

  of the wait, what if in the passage, in the what if

  that carries us each day into seasons, what if

  in the renewed resilience, what if in the endlessness,

  what if in a lifetime of conversations, what if

  in the clarity of consciousness, what if nothing changes?

  iv

  What if you are responsible to saving more than to changing?

  What if you’re the destruction coursing beneath

  your language of savior? Is that, too, not fucked up?

  You say, if other white people had not … or if it seemed like

  not enough … I would have …

  What if—the repetitive call of what if—is only considered repetitive

  when what if leaves my lips, when what if is uttered

  by the unheard, and what if

  what if is the cement of insistence

  when you insist what if

  this is.

  v

  What is it we want to keep conscious, to stay known, even as we say, each in our own way, I so love I know I shrink I’m asked I’m also I react I smell I feel I think I’ve been told I remember I see I didn’t I thought I felt I failed I suspect I was doing I’m sure I read I needed I wouldn’t I was I should’ve I felt I could’ve I never I’m sure I ask …

  You say and I say but what

  is it we are telling, what is it

  we are wanting to know about here?

  vi

  What if what I want from you is new, newly made

  a new sentence in response to all my questions,

  a swerve in our relation and the words that carry us,

  the care that carries. 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.

  liminal spaces i

  In the early days of the run- up to the 2016 election, I was just beginning to prepare a class on whiteness to teach at Yale University, where I had been newly hired. Over the years, I had come to realize that I often did not share historical knowledge with the persons to whom I was speaking. “What’s redlining?” someone would ask. “George Washington freed his slaves?” someone else would inquire. What are Shirley Cards and how did they determine what was the correct skin tone balance?1 yet another person wondered. But as I listened to Donald Trump’s inflammatory rhetoric during the
campaign that spring, the class took on a new dimension. Would my students understand the long history that informed a comment like one Trump made when he announced his presidential candidacy? “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best,” he said. “They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.” When I heard those words, I wanted my students to track immigration laws in the United States. Would they connect the current treatment of both documented and undocumented Mexicans with the treatment of Irish, Italian, and Asian people in the last century?

  In preparation, I needed to slowly unpack and understand how whiteness was created. How did the Naturalization Act of 1790, which restricted citizenship to “any alien, being a free white person,” develop over the years into our various immigration acts? What has it taken to cleave citizenship from “free white person”? What was the trajectory of the Ku Klux Klan after its formation after the end of the Civil War, and what was its relationship to the Black Codes, those laws subsequently passed in Southern states to restrict black people’s freedoms? Did the United States government bomb the black community in Tulsa, Oklahoma, also known as Black Wall Street, in 1921? How did Italians, Irish, and Slavic peoples become white? Why do people believe abolitionists could not be racist?

  I wanted my students to gain an awareness of a growing body of work by sociologists, theorists, historians, and literary scholars in a field known as “whiteness studies,” the cornerstones of which include Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, David Roediger’s The Wages of Whiteness, Matthew Frye Jacobson’s Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race, Richard Dyer’s White, and more recently Nell Irvin Painter’s The History of White People. Roediger, a historian, had explained to me the development of the field, one that my class would engage with, saying, “The 1980s and early ’90s saw the publication of major works on white identity’s intricacies and costs by James Baldwin and Toni Morrison, alongside new works by white writers and activists asking similar questions historically. Given the seeming novelty of such white writing and the urgency of understanding white support for Ronald Reagan, ‘critical whiteness studies’ gained media attention and a small foothold in universities.”2 This area of study aimed to make visible a history of whiteness that through its association with “normalcy” and “universality” masked its omnipresent institutional power.

  My class eventually became Constructions of Whiteness, and over the two years that I have taught it, many of my students (who have included just about every race, gender identity, and sexual orientation) interviewed white people on campus or in their families about their understanding of American history and how it relates to whiteness. Some students simply wanted to know how others around them would define their own whiteness. Others were troubled by their own family members’ racism and wanted to understand how and why certain prejudices formed. Still others wanted to show the impact of white expectations on their lives.

  Perhaps this is why one day in New Haven, staring into the semicircle of oak trees in my backyard, I wondered what it would mean to ask random white men how they understood their privilege. I imagined myself—a middle-aged black woman—walking up to strangers to do so. Would they react as the police captain in Plainfield, Indiana, did when his female colleague told him during a diversity training session that he benefited from “white male privilege”? He became angry and accused her of using a racialized slur against him. (She was placed on paid administrative leave and a reprimand was placed in her file.) Would I, too, be accused? Would I hear myself asking about white male privilege and then watch white man after white man walk away as if I were mute? Would they think I worked for Trevor Noah, Stephen Colbert, or Chelsea Handler and just forgot my camera crew? The running comment in our current political climate is that we all need to converse with people we don’t normally speak to, and though my husband is white, 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.

  Weeks later, it occurred to me that I tend to be surrounded by white men I don’t know when I’m traveling, caught in places that are essentially nowhere: in between, en route, up in the air. As I crisscrossed the United States, Europe, and Africa giving talks about my work, I found myself considering these white men who passed hours with me in airport lounges, at gates, on planes. They seemed to me to make up the largest percentage of business travelers in the liminal spaces where we waited. That I was among them in airport lounges and in first-class cabins spoke in part to my own relative economic privilege, but the price of my ticket, of course, does not translate into social capital. I was always aware that my value in our culture’s eyes is determined by my skin color first and foremost. This is also true for the white men around me. Maybe these white male travelers could answer my questions about white privilege. I felt certain that, as a black woman, there had to be something I didn’t understand.

  Just recently, a friend who didn’t get a job he applied for told me that, as a white male, he was absorbing the problems of the world. He meant he was being punished for the sins of his forefathers. He wanted me to know he understood it was his burden to bear. I wanted to tell him that he needed to take a long view of the history of the workplace, given the imbalances that generations of hiring practices before him had created. But would that really make my friend feel any better? Did he understand that, today, 64 percent of elected officials are white men, though they make up only 31 percent of the American population? White men have held almost all the power in this country for four hundred years.3

  I knew that my friend was trying to communicate his struggle to find a way to understand the complicated American structure that holds us both. I wanted to ask him if his expectation was a sign of his privilege but decided, given the loss of his job opportunity, that my role as a friend probably demanded other responses.

  After a series of casual conversations with my white male travelers, would I come to understand white privilege any differently? 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. But because I have only lived as me, a person who regularly has to negotiate conscious and unconscious dismissal, erasure, disrespect, and abuse, I fell into this wondering silently. Always, I hesitated.

  I hesitated when I stood in line for a flight across the country, and a white man stepped in front of me. He was with another white man. “Excuse me,” I said. “I am in this line.” He stepped behind me but not before saying to his flight mate, “You never know who they’re letting into first class these days.”

  Was his statement a defensive move meant to cover his rudeness and embarrassment, or were we sharing a joke? Perhaps he, too, had heard one of the many recent anecdotes on social media in which a black woman recalled a white woman’s stepping in front of her at her gate. In one when the black woman told her she was in line, the white woman responded that it was the line for first class. In another she simply says “excuse me” and inserts herself in front of the black woman. Was the man’s comment a sly reference? But he wasn’t laughing, not even a little. Deadpan.

  Later, when I discussed this moment with my therapist, she told me that she thought the man’s statement was in response to his flight mate, not me. I didn’t matter to him, she said; that’s why he could step in front of me in the first place. His embarrassment, if it was embarrassment, had everything to do with how he was seen by the person who did matter: his white male companion. I was allowing myself to have too much presence in his imagination, she said. Should this be a comfort? Was my total invisibility preferable to a tar
geted insult?

  During the flight, each time he removed or replaced something in his case overhead, he looked over at me. Each time, I looked up from my book to meet his gaze and smiled—I like to think I’m not humorless. I tried to imagine what my presence was doing to him. On some level, I thought, I must have dirtied up his narrative of white privilege securing white spaces. In my class, I had taught “Whiteness as Property,” an article published in the Harvard Law Review in 1993, in which the author, Cheryl Harris, argues that “the set of assumptions, privileges, and benefits that accompany the status of being white have become a valuable asset that whites sought to protect.” These are the assumptions of privilege and exclusion that have led many white Americans to call the police on black people trying to enter their own homes or vehicles. Racial profiling becomes another sanctioned method of segregating space. Harris goes on to explain how much white people rely on these benefits, so much so that their expectations inform the interpretations of our laws. “Stand your ground” laws, for example, mean whites can claim that fear made them kill an unarmed black person.

  The same fear defense has allowed many police who kill unarmed blacks to continue working and then retire with their pensions. Or voter registration laws in certain states can function as de facto Jim Crow laws. “American law,” Harris writes, “has recognized a property interest in whiteness.”

  On the plane, I wanted to enact a new narrative that included the whiteness of the man who had stepped in front of me. I felt his whiteness should be a component of what we both understood about him, even as his whiteness would not be the entirety of who he is. His unconscious understanding of whiteness meant the space I inhabited should have been only his. The old script would have left his whiteness unacknowledged in my consideration of his slight. But a rude man and a rude white man have different presumptions. Just as when a white person confronted by an actual black human being needs to negotiate stereotypes of blackness so that they can arrive at the person standing before them, I hoped to give the man the same courtesy but in the reverse. Seeing his whiteness meant I understood my presence as an unexpected demotion for him. It was too bad if he felt that way. Still, I wondered, what is this “stuckness” inside racial hierarchies that refuses the neutrality of the skies? I hoped to find a way to have this conversation.