Just Us

 

Just Us: An American Conversation by Claudia Rankine
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This book points out several ways microagressions are perpetrated from whites to blacks, and their ensuing hurt, and it is eye-opening and humbling. However, this book is not a conversation. It is Rankine pointing out these offenses in essays that she then gives to the offender to respond to. These are mostly people she is friends with, and who are trying to be actively non-racist. And although she receives several different types of replies, her response is always to find more offenses, even in the friend who chose not to reply at all. Once again I am left wondering if there is anything I can do as a white person that won't cause offense somehow--or maybe that is the message--that I can't. What I would love to read is ways we can extend grace, forgiveness, and understanding across all cultural and racial boundaries.

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"James Baldwin Discusses the Problem of Being White in America" (1985);  "When Americans say change in the generality, they really mean progress.  And when they say progress, they really mean--and they don't know they mean this--they really mean how quickly and to what extent and how profoundly a black person becomes white.  They take themselves quite helplessly as the only possible model of what they call change."

Homi Bhabha from The Location of Culture, in conversation with Toni Morrison: "Remembering is never a quiet act of introspection or retrospection.  It is a painful re-membering, a putting together of the dismembered past to make sense of the trauma of the present."