Just Us: An American Conversation

Claudia Rankine is the author of this book, as well as its narrator and protagonist. Her experience as a Black woman confronting white supremacy and, particularly, the default privileges that white men enjoy in American society, fuel the book’s narrative.

Rankine is a Jamaica-born American writer and the first member of her family to attend both college and graduate school. She attended private, Catholic primary and secondary schools while growing up. She is married to John Lucas, who is also her creative collaborator. The pair met when Rankine was 30. Together, they have a teenage daughter.

Rankine is a writer who also teaches at Yale University, where she has invented a course that explores what it means to be white, particularly in American society. Rankine uses her experiences as a Black woman, as a dark-skinned Black woman, as a naturalized American citizen, as an upper-middle class person, and as a person who frequently enters spaces that are usually occupied by white people to explore white privilege in American society, particularly white male privilege. By recognizing the ways in which she is stereotyped, misunderstood, objectified, and dismissed in white society, she helps the reader understand her subjectivity within racism. She reminds them, too, that these conversations are not abstract, but are rooted in lived experiences. There are moments, too, in which Rankine confronts the discrimination that other groups, particularly Asians and Latin people, experience, while also critiquing their own potential to exhibit anti-Black bias.