Just Us: An American Conversation

Rankine tells a white male friend from college about a cross burning that occurred on what became their future campus in the fall of 1981. Her friend didn’t know this had happened. Rankine wonders if this is a fundamental difference between them, despite how long they’ve been friends. He looks on his phone to research the event and finds out that, indeed, it happened.

Rankine wonders about her other white college friends and if they know about the cross burning. If they do, do they count it among their college experiences? She doubts that they do. Rankine calls a white female college friend who does recall the incident. In fact, this woman is the one who reported it because she saw its perpetrators. This college friend is descended from those who came to the American colonies on the Mayflower. She is a WASP with blond hair and blue eyes. She attended New England prep schools and, like Rankine, Ivy League institutions. Aside from their education, Rankine notes, they have little in common, but remain close friends. This woman was leaving a Homecoming party hosted by the Black Student Union when she witnessed the cross burning. This knowledge makes Rankine wonder if white people befriend people of color, especially Black people, so that they can avoid being implicated in white supremacist violence.

Rankine’s friend was a freshman. She recalls that the cross burning happened in 1980. She attended the party with a Black man who was a sophomore. They went to lots of parties together, she recalled, and decided to go to this one, which “was open to anyone” (120). As they were leaving, she saw “two men dressed in robes running toward the trees” (120). As they ran away, the cross the men had erected and lit became enflamed. Rankine’s friend thought about chasing the men. Instead, she alerted everyone still at the party to what had happened. Someone then called security, and Rankine’s friend told them what she had seen. During a meeting with high-level administrators, she was unable to identify the men from a series of photos because of the sheets that they wore. She was able to move on from the event, she told Rankine, but was unsure of how the other students had felt. Now, she wonders if she should have tried to put the burning cross out before alerting everyone to what had happened. She also still wonders if she should have chased the men. She wonders, too, how these men found each other, if she ever sat beside one of them in a class, and what they are doing today. She asks herself if they regret this act, “now that they are older and wiser,” if they “[cheer] on the white nationalist movement” (122).

Rankine considers her friend’s assumption that “racism is solely a dynamic of youth and ignorance […] its own form of American optimism” (122). In Rankine’s mind, the cross burners are probably still white supremacists. However, this friend’s unwillingness to acknowledge the persistence of racism is a way, Rankine posits, to avoid acknowledging the connection that present trauma has to the past and future. The police reports from the time say that students were suspects in the cross-burning incidents. Rankine wonders what they are doing now, if they might be working in the justice system.

An FBI investigation of the cross burning concluded that it “had probably been a prank” (123). Whoever conducted the burning also continued to harass students who had attended the Black Student Union event. One student received a letter calling Black people “Monkies” [sic] and threatened that they “[would] eventually be phased out” (123).

Rankine contemplates Black people experiencing these events, then going on to become successful, even wealthy in some instances. These racist experiences seem to contradict that later success. What liberal whites must understand, she suggests, is that “black personal achievement does not negate the continued assault of white terrorism” (124).

Rankine is trying to understand why white men get so offended when they are told that they benefit from “white male privilege” (132). She uses the case of Police Captain Scott Arndt becoming deeply offended with another police captain, Carri Weber, for addressing the issue. Weber is a Black woman.

Arndt and Weber were attending a diversity training about transgender people being more vulnerable to police violence. Arndt questioned whether they were more likely to experience violence than people who were not transgender. He then asserted that “[m]ost of the people that [he knows] have never […] accused the police of violence,” which made him question the statistic (132). Weber interjected that his unawareness was due to his privilege as a white man. The workshop’s instructor and facilitator dismissed Weber’s claim, reminding her that they weren’t talking about white privilege and were trying “to focus on a different demographic” (132).

Arndt later filed a complaint, saying that the phrase “white male privilege” was “extremely offensive” and that he had been “racially and sexistly slurred” (134). Weber was placed on paid administrative leave and received a letter of reprimand before being reinstated. Arndt received a two-day suspension with no pay.

Rankine wonders what Arndt was so enraged about. Surely, he knows that he’s a white man. Is it the word “privilege” that aroused his ire? His use of the phrase “racial slur” indicated that Weber had said something offensive about his being white. Rankine concludes that the juxtaposition of whiteness with privilege must be offensive to some. The word “privilege,” Rankine notes, was first used during the 12th century and “referred to a bill of law in favor of or against an individual” (135).