67 pages • 2-hour read
Just Us: An American Conversation
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Themes
Navigating Racism in Domestic and Public Spaces
Rankine explores how white supremacy manifests in a variety of shared spaces—airports, private dining rooms, and public streets—to illustrate the ways in which Black people’s movements and speech are frequently circumscribed by racism.
In airports, Rankine expresses her feelings of isolation. She is one of few people of color and one of few women traveling alone and using business class. Most of the other passengers are white men. There is, thus, the suggestion that she is an outlier, though she has paid for a ticket like everyone else. Moreover, airports are transient spaces in which people have come to watch out for potential danger, and to profile Black and brown passengers as potential sources of that danger, due to Western stereotypes about who gets classified as a “terrorist.” Rankine’s anecdote about being flagged frequently by TSA, while a white male passenger never gets flagged, reinforces this. This racial profiling of Black and brown people as terrorists is juxtaposed with white people who have committed racist terrorism for decades, yet are seldom, if ever, profiled as terrorists.
Airline service is another area in which white privilege becomes a factor. The presumption that Rankine has been “let” into first class, as a white male passenger says, connotes that membership in first class is not merely economic to some people. The flight attendant who brings a white male passenger two drinks in the time that it takes her to consistently forget Rankine’s request for a single orange juice illustrates how bias—conscious or unconscious—can impact a flight attendant’s ability to look after all passengers equally.
At dinner parties, there are frequent political conversations, which seems contrary to traditional etiquette. These conversations become uncomfortable when Rankine, often the only Black person present, asserts her ideas about race. Her presence as the sole Black guest, or one of few, ends up tokenizing her. She becomes the resident expert on race, either feeling compelled to comment on the subject or being asked to do so.
Through her transcription of 911 calls, Rankine also explores how white people try to control Black bodies in public spaces. This habit is rooted in legacies of slavery, Jim Crow, and ghettoization. The police, thus, come to resemble modern-day slave patrols, called to collect Black people off of streets and out of businesses to deposit them in cells or “where they belong.”
Racism and anti-Black biases prevent Black people from moving and speaking freely within both public and private spaces. Freedom can be defined as no sense of fear or peril, as well as the surety that one will be served with as much respect and graciousness as other patrons.
Structural Racism in Education
Rankine personalizes the matter of structural racism in education by focusing on her parental concerns and those of another Black mother when it comes to equity. In this instance, equity is about children having the freedom to be who they are and to exhibit behaviors that are typical of their age groups without being stereotypes and stigmatized.
Rankine compares her biracial daughter’s school experiences with her own and wonders if they are at all similar. Given that Rankine is a darker-skinned Black woman and a naturalized American citizen, they are likely not. However, Rankine’s teenage daughter is still regarded as Black in a predominately white setting. Her skin color might mitigate certain expressions of racism, but she is not protected from it.
Similarly unprotected is the four-year-old son of a friend of Rankine’s. The episode in which the child is called “violent” heightens the reader’s understanding of how easily Black boys are isolated in American classrooms and marked early on as “a problem.” The fact that the child attended a private school doesn’t help. This detail reifies the reality that money and class cannot protect Black children from racism. Lingering notions that Black children are not really children, which are also rooted in slavery (children were made to work in the fields as early as 12), cause authority figures to fail to protect and acknowledge them. This indifference to the safety of Black children is exemplified by two episodes that Rankine mentions: a school resource officer slamming a Black girl to the floor for being disobedient, and the white officer slamming a Black girl at a McKinney, Texas, pool party to the ground after a white resident called the police to complain about the presences of Black teenagers.
As one of few Black academics at Yale University, Rankine is, again, an outlier. During a conversation with a white father whose white son did not get into the university, she becomes representative of the university and its admissions policy. The father’s assumption that his son would get accepted is not unlike assumptions about who belongs in first class on a plane. Despite this, there is a false belief in meritocracy, as evidenced by Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s testimony that it was hard work alone that earned him a place in Yale Law School, despite his grandfather having been a Yale alum. The same concession is not given to students of color. The father to whom Rankine speaks mentions that his son’s best friend, who is Asian, was accepted because he could play what the man called the “diversity card.” Diversity is, thus, disregarded as a necessity for a holistic education and as more of a point that one can score to beat a competitor.
Rankine’s anecdotes exemplify how structural racism impacts children of all races, as early as pre-Kindergarten. White supremacy in educational institutions teach Black children that they are less desirable and less accounted for, while white children are made to believe that they will always be seen and will always have a place, regardless of their level of achievement.
The Historical Legacy of Whiteness and White Supremacy
Rankine’s exploration of white supremacy starts with the Founding Fathers. Both George Washington and Thomas Jefferson were slave-holding Virginians, a fact that is inextricable from their ideas about government. Virginia was the nation’s wealthiest state due to its tobacco and, later, cotton cash crops. Both Washington and Jefferson had substantial estates and owned hundreds of slaves, respectively. The tendency to leave these facts out of our narratives about these two men is a form of whitewashing and collective forgetting. It is a habit that overlooks the moral failings of men whom the public would rather mythologize and idealize. It also reflects a need to forget about where the United States’ enormous wealth comes from.
After slavery ended in most parts of the South in 1863, the former Confederacy instituted Black Codes to control newly freed Black people. Vagrancy laws eventually led to convict-leasing, in which the US’ contemporary penal system is rooted. The institution of sharecropping under the auspices of an “apprentice” system, which included children, entrapped Black people into a lifetime of servitude, not unlike slavery (they still lived in shanties on plantations), without adequate compensation and no options for better employment, as whites dominated industrial jobs in the South.
The nation not only used enslaved Black people to build its wealth, but its institutions also made a concerted effort to keep that wealth among white people to ensure the economic supremacy of the dominant group. Rankine describes how both the practice of redlining and the destruction of Tulsa’s Greenwood community assisted in that effort. These actions also underscore the hypocrisy of white people who blame higher poverty rates among Black communities on something pathological within the race—a disinclination toward achievement, for example. The prosperity of Greenwood and similar Black communities proves that self-sufficiency has long existed among Black people. The destruction of Greenwood and other similarly prosperous Black communities also highlights white supremacy’s impulse to extinguish all attempts by Black people to self-govern and create wealth.
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