Just Us: An American Conversation

Rankine is talking to a white friend about “the class breakdown in the television series Big Little Lies” (178). Rankine and this friend live in similar houses. She makes the mistake of putting herself and this woman in the same class as Reese Witherspoon’s character on the show.

Rankine has no inherited wealth and, unlike her friend, had no choice about whether to stay home and forfeit work in favor of raising her child. On the surface, she and her white friend’s lives look similar. They are both writers with similar educational backgrounds, similar traumas, and similar hopes for themselves and their families. However, Rankine knows that, even Black and white people who end up attending the same college and living in the same dorm, still wouldn’t end up in the same place economically. Whites enjoy “a median net worth that is ten times that of blacks” (178).

Also, Rankine’s friend is descended from those who came over on the Mayflower. Rankine is a naturalized citizen, a Black woman, and of the first generation in her family to receive a college education. Rankine wonders if her mistake unveiled a desire to become her friend, to feel a sense of equality with white people that she will never have. She knows, too, that her need to pose this question comes from “a white-centered framework that believes all aspirational life is toward whiteness” (179). Something would have to shift structurally for Rankine and her friend to have the same kind of life, which “ensures a level of citizenry, safety, mobility, and belonging” that Rankine will never have (179). Her friend’s ability to understand all of this is why they can be friends, but their relative ease with each other doesn’t translate to sameness.

Rankine knows that she must be aware of her friend’s advantages to understand their relationship more fully. However, when Rankine asked her friend to read an early draft of this book chapter, her friend expressed having “no thoughts of interest” (182). Rankine found this strange coming from another writer who usually has thoughts about so many things.

Rankine goes to see the Jackie Sibblies Drury play Fairview with a friend who is a white woman. The play contemplates race. Toward the end of the play, one of the characters asks all of the white members of the audience to go onstage. The white man sitting behind Rankine dislikes the request but obeys anyway. Rankine’s white companion, on the other hand, refuses. This makes Rankine tense. The playwright is a Black woman, too, and has requested this of some audience members whom she knew would be white. Rankine feels betrayed by her friend’s non-compliance.

Perhaps Sibblies would think that the play’s success depends on some white people disobeying this command to go onstage. Maybe Sibblies would want Black members of the audience to become aware of the divisive aspect of the request, which would prompt them to walk out. Sibblies might even wonder why anyone would obey the request at all.

The actor onstage speaks the final lines of the play, which are quotes from famous Black authors. Rankine is still thinking about her friend’s non-compliance. This refusal begins to feel like ownership of the theater to Rankine. Finally, when the play ends, Rankine questions her friend, who doesn’t respond. Her resistance didn’t feel like solidarity; it felt like further confirmation of the notion that “black people’s requests don’t matter” (191).

Over the next two weeks, Rankine and her friend avoid speaking again about this play. Rankine thinks of her therapist once telling her that “some white patients who identify with trauma and victimization see themselves as black or Jewish in their dreams” (192). What was her friend doing when she refused to go onstage? Was she refusing to turn herself into the object of someone’s gaze? Maybe she just hates being told what to do.

Finally, Rankine asks her friend why she refused Sibblies’s command. She simply says that she didn’t want to. Rankine wonders about that. The friend later explains that she had felt the play was brilliant, but that she tends to “shrink […] from scenes where [she’s] asked […] to feel bad as a white person” (195). She doesn’t like engaging in what she considers to be “white moral masochism” (196). Then again, she says, she wanted Sibblies’s play to be successful. So, if other white people hadn’t gone onstage, she would have. She felt responsible in that way. She had also hoped that her not going onstage would add an interesting piece to the play. In any case, owning her whiteness in that moment felt difficult.

Rankine appreciates her friend’s response. She is relieved also to know that, whatever she may be feeling, she can always ask her friend to give her more context.

Rankine then takes an excerpt from Audre Lorde’s 1981 speech at the National Women’s Studies Association Conference in Storrs, Connecticut.

Lorde begins by noting that women’s responses to racism is a response to their anger over exclusion, unmitigated privilege, racial distortions, silence, stereotyping, betrayal, coopting, and other indignities often heaped upon them. Lorde discourages listeners from resorting to “[g]uilt and defensiveness,” which serve no purpose (202).

Lorde also specifies whom she means when she talks about women of color. These include all women who are not white. All women of color have something to learn from each other, as their experiences of racism are different. Thus, Lorde asserts, it is important for them to listen to each other. This is especially important because women have been conditioned “to view any difference other than sex as a reason for destruction” (203). She encourages Black and white women, particularly, who have been systematically separated by distortions, to ask themselves who benefits from the contention between them. Even if they speak to each other in anger, they are still speaking. More importantly, Lorde notes that she has tried to learn how her anger can be useful, as well as limiting.