A TLS FINANCIAL TIMES NEW STATESMAN GUARDIAN OBSERVER AND WHITE REVIEW BOOK OF THE YEAR
FINALIST 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.
