A TLS FINANCIAL TIMES NEW STATESMAN GUARDIAN OBSERVER AND WHITE REVIEW BOOK OF THE
YEARFINALIST FOR THE 2021 ANDREW CARNEGIE MEDAL FOR EXCELLENCE IN NONFICTION From award-winning
writer Claudia Rankine the stunning follow-up to Citizen and Don't Let Me Be Lonely 'Riveting'
Bernardine Evaristo TLS (Books of the Year) 'Brilliant' Gary Younge New Statesman (Books of
the Year) 'Timely and powerful' Fatima Bhutto Financial Times 'One of our time's most incisive
brilliant and necessary intellectuals' Seán Hewitt Irish Times 'Ranking is a writer of genius'
Jeremy Noel-Tod Sunday Times At home and in government contemporary America finds itself
riven by a culture war in which aggression and defensiveness alike are on the rise. It is not
alone. In such partisan conditions how can humans best approach one another across our
differences? Taking the study of whiteness and white supremacy as a guiding light Claudia
Rankine explores a series of real encounters with friends and strangers - each disrupting the
false comfort of spaces where our public and private lives intersect like the airport the
theatre the dinner party and the voting booth - and urges us to enter into the conversations
which could offer the only humane pathways through this moment of division. Just Us is an
invitation to discover what it takes to stay in the room together and to breach the silence
guilt and violence that surround whiteness. Brilliantly arranging essays images and poems
along with the voices and rebuttals of others it counterpoints Rankine's own text with
facing-page notes and commentary and closes with a bravura study of women confronting the
political and cultural implications of dyeing their hair blonde. Wry vulnerable and prescient
this is Rankine's most intimate work less interested in being right than in being true and
being together.
