The first and only poet to write a New York Times bestseller, the winner of every significant literary prize in the United States, Jamaican-born Claudia Rankine is an icon of contemporary American letters.
Aggression and defensiveness alike are on the rise. How can we best approach one another across our differences?
In this conversation with Guardian columnist Owen Jones, Yale Professor and bestselling author explores her own prejudices and those of others, and celebrate vulnerability, openness and the willingness to be wrong.
It’s an urgent call to enter into conversations which could offer humane pathways through this moment of division.
Praise for Claudia Rankine’s Just Us – An American Conversation:
Claudia Rankine marshalls the full range of her substantial talents – from poetry to essay – to explore how racism is lived, privilege is expressed and engagement might be possible. Personal, political, interrogative and, most all, impressive — Gary Younge
This brilliant and multi-layered work is a call, a bid, an insistent, rightly impatient demand for a public conversation on whiteness . . . bold and vital — Judith Butler
In my work, well-meaning white people consistently ask me how to recognize racism. Yet we might ask, “How have we managed not to know?” The information is everywhere, if we care to listen . . . With clarity and grace, Claudia Rankine delivers a gut punch to white denial. Just Us is stunning work – audacious, revelatory, devastating — Robin DiAngelo
In Just Us, Claudia Rankine continues her remarkable and brilliant interrogation of the language, culture, and history that have shaped America, forging through poems, essays, and documents a literary archive that is utterly original and desperately needed — Dinaw Mengestu
Fiercely intimate, rigorous . . . [Just Us] lets all of us in on the conversations – with others and the self – that are necessary for survival — Nuar Alsadir
