Just Us: An American Conversation

It is 2016, around the time of the presidential election, and Rankine is preparing a course on whiteness. She has just been hired to teach at Yale University. During the class, students ask questions about redlining or if George Washington had freed his slaves. Someone else asks about Shirley Cards. The class takes on “a new dimension” as Rankine listens to Trump’s blatantly racist rhetoric during the campaign (18). She wonders if her students understand that Trump’s denigrating comments about Mexicans are not exactly new but are rooted in a long racist history connected to “the treatment of Irish, Italian, and Asian people in the last century” (18). She thinks about the invention of whiteness and the Naturalization Act of 1790’s connection to contemporary immigration laws.

Rankine thinks more about whiteness and citizenship. She wonders what process made Italian, Irish, and Slavic peoples white. She considers how citizenship has been rooted in the notion of being a “free white person” (18). She compares the formation of the Ku Klux Klan to the introduction of the Black Codes. She wonders if it was the U.S. government that had bombed Greenwood—the Black Wall Street of Tulsa, Oklahoma. Finally, she wonders why people believe abolitionists cannot be racist.

Rankine plans to introduce her students to works by a range of theorists, historians, and literary scholars who have created the foundation of what is becoming known as “whiteness studies.” These scholars include novelist Toni Morrison, film scholar Richard Dyer, and historian Nell Irvin Painter. The purpose of the field of study is to unmask the association of whiteness with what is socially normal and universal to help people understand “its omnipresent institutional power” (19).

Rankine names her class Constructions of Whiteness. By the time this book has been published, she has taught the class for two years. Her students have interviewed white people at Yale and members of their families. Some become troubled by the existence of racism within their own families. Others try to illustrate “the impact of white expectations on their lives” (19).

Rankine begins to wonder what would happen if she asked white male strangers about their privilege. She places this in context of the contemporary idea that everyone should try to talk to someone to whom they would not normally speak. Though Rankine is married to a white man, she realizes that this is the only group with which she does not easily converse. When she travels, however, she is surrounded by white men. They seem “to make up the largest percentage of business travelers in the liminal spaces where [they wait]” (21).

While thinking about white male privilege, Rankine recalls the words of a white male friend who had not gotten a job to which he had applied. He reasoned that he was being “punished for the sins of his forefathers” (21). Rankine advised him to think about the historical imbalances that have impacted the workplace. However, she knows that this will not make him feel better. It would not really matter to him, in this instance, that “64 percent of elected officials are white men, though they make up only 31 percent” of the populace in the United States (21). Rankine had wanted to ask her friend if his expectation had something to do with his sense of privilege, but she decided against it in that moment. She knows that her role as a friend requires other responses.

One day, Rankine is standing in the first-class line, waiting for a cross-country flight. A white man steps in front of her. He’s with another white man. She tells him that she is in line, too. When the man steps behind her, he says to his companion that one can never tell who is being “[let] into first class these days” (23). Rankine later shares this moment with a therapist, who suggests that the man’s comment probably had less to do with Rankine, who didn’t really matter, and more to do with how the man felt himself being seen by his white male companion, who did matter. Rankine wonders if she should be comforted by the notion of her invisibility. Is that better than being pointedly insulted?

Rankine thinks back to the flight. After they boarded the plane, the man repeatedly looked over at her every time he removed or replaced something in his overhead compartment. Each time he did this, Rankine looked up from the book she was reading, looked at him, and smiled. She wondered “what [her] presence was doing to him” (26).

In her Yale class, Rankine has taught the article “Whiteness as Property,” published in Harvard Law Review in 1993. The author, Cheryl Harris, argues that white people feel the need to protect “the set of assumptions, privileges, and benefits” that accompany one’s status as a white person (26). Such assumptions lead white people to call the police on Black people, even when the latter are simply trying to enter their own homes. Similarly, the man on the plane believed that the first-class compartment should have been his only. Seeing Rankine there, she reasons, meant that he had unexpectedly been demoted.

Rankine and her students also study the works of scholar Peggy McIntosh and documentary filmmaker Whitney Dow. Both are white. Dow “gathered data on more than 850 people” who “identified as white or partly white” (30). Rankine asks Dow what he learned during his conversations with white men. Dow tells her that they seemed to be learning how to reconstruct their narratives, but they were struggling. They are trying, he says, to create “a just narrative for themselves as new information comes in” (30).

One person whom Dow interviewed claimed that the first slave owner in the United States was a Black man and that slaves had been sold to whites by Black people. Thus, he concluded, Black people were not owed “any special privileges other than that anybody else has” (30). He also denied having any privileges himself. Another interviewee recognized that being white had aided in his mobility. He worked in law enforcement and lived in a white, rural area. He felt like an outcast in his workplace due to his relative progressiveness. Rankine considers this interviewee’s observation that his privilege was particular to his being from a mostly white, rural area, which indicates that he might not believe that his privilege also operates in other circumstances.

Rankine concludes that there’s no sense in being angry at the white airline passenger because his behavior was a result of his socialization, just as her preparation for such behavior was part of her socialization. Her socialization, thus, allows her to reject the white man’s stereotypes about her, “even as he interacts with those stereotypes” (32).

Rankine recalls another instance in the airport. She was waiting in line for another flight when a group of white men approached and, instead of queueing behind everyone else, decided to form their own line beside the existent one. Rankine was amused. The gate agent decided to merge the new line with the original one. The other passengers in Rankine’s line were mostly white and male. They regarded the arrangement with puzzlement but, ultimately, accepted it.

Rankine decides to use this second episode in the airport for her course on whiteness. She wonders how her students will regard this anecdote. Some, she figures, will be angry with the white female agent at the gate who allowed this second line. Rankine would wonder why the students would be angrier with her than with the white men who formed their own line. A student might say that she misused her institutional power or didn’t recognize it. Based on previous experiences, Rankine figures that the young white men would be eager “to distance themselves from the men at the gate” (35). Whatever the results, Rankine concludes, the episode would be helpful in getting her to measure the class’s recognition of white privilege because so many other white people were inconvenienced by the behavior of this group of white men. Some students, she realizes, would see the issue as more gendered than racialized. In that instance, she would ask if they could imagine a group of Black men doing this without anyone calling their actions into question.

On her next flight, Rankine is returning home from Johannesburg. She notices that the flight attendant has brought everyone else’s drinks but repeatedly forgets her orange juice. Rankine tries to be understanding, making the private excuse that the lack of sugar is better for her anyway, as her body is still recovering from chemotherapy treatments. She nods in response to the flight attendant’s apologies. The white man sitting next to Rankine speaks up, remarking on how outrageous it is that the flight attendant has brought him two drinks in the time that it has taken her to forget Rankine’s first drink request. The flight attendant returns with the orange juice. After Rankine thanks the man, he concludes that the flight attendant is simply bad at her job. Rankine suggests that the flight attendant might have a crush on him. In response, the man blushes, not understanding Rankine’s joke.

The white male passenger beside Rankine tells her that he’s just returning from Cape Town. They talk about South Africa. Rankine mentions the resort at which she stayed and the safari that she took. She doesn’t mention Soweto or the Apartheid Museum or how the museum reminded her of the lynching memorial in Montgomery, Alabama. She doesn’t mention anything about race, despite wanting him to bring it up himself—to think about his whiteness in the context of his having just returned from South Africa. Then again, her talking about race would have made it less likely that she could converse so easily with him.

When she returns home, Rankine mentions these encounters with white male passengers to her husband, who says that the white fragility of those men makes them defensive. He starts talking about President Trump, calling him “a clear case of indignation and rage in the face of privilege writ large” (41). Rankine includes him with other racially-conscious, or “woke,” white men who recognize their privilege while placing themselves outside of patterns of behavior that brought Trump to power. Rankine recognizes her husband’s ability to exclude himself from these patterns as a form of privilege.

Finally, Rankine becomes courageous enough to ask a white male stranger about white privilege. She is sitting next to him at a gate, waiting for another flight. They are mutually frustrated by a delay. He asks about her profession. She tells him that she writes and teaches. When he asks where she does her work, she answers that she teaches at Yale. The man reveals that his son had applied to Yale, early-decision, but couldn’t get in. He mentions that it’s tough to make the cut “when you can’t play the diversity card” (41). He then says that Asians are overwhelming the Ivy Leagues. When Rankine asks him about his white male privilege, the man insists that he has worked for everything he has. This makes Rankine think about Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s self-defense during his Supreme Court confirmation, when he defended his work ethic and denied having any connections to Yale Law School, despite the fact that his grandfather attended Yale.

Rankine looks again at the white passenger and wonders if he is “an ethnic white rather than a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant” (43). According to historian David Roediger, another author whose works Rankine uses in her class, intermarriage during the post-World War II era diminished the hierarchies that existed within whiteness, allowing formerly excluded and subordinated groups to identify collectively “as socially constructed Caucasians” (43). Rankine asks the fellow passenger if he ever gets pulled aside by the TSA for an additional search. He says that he doesn’t because he has Global Entry. Rankine notes that she does, too, but she still gets flagged. She then asks him if he moves in and out of public spaces without anyone ever questioning his presence. Rankine knows the answer to her questions, but she is trying to help the man see what she sees.

The white male passenger returns to the subject of Yale. He mentions that his son’s best friend is Asian. The young man was accepted to Yale through an early-decision program. Rankine is disinterested in the subject of college admissions, but she realizes that she has become representative of Yale. Rankine refrains from asking this man why he is so sure that his son is entitled to a place at the college. She knows that college admissions processes are complicated, often taking in numerous factors. Most of those factors, however, still favor white applicants. To placate him, she tells him that his son will be happy wherever he goes to school, and, in five years, the whole episode will be forgotten. She feels exhausted by this encounter.

Soon thereafter, Rankine is on another flight sitting beside another white man who feels like a friend. He tells her that he’s been working on diversity at his company. He then adds that he “[doesn’t] see color” (47). She thinks that he’s indirectly referencing Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s quote about children being “judged not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character” (48). She wonders if the man would’ve brought up his diversity efforts if he were not talking to a Black woman. Finally, she asks if he can see that he’s a white man. She tells him that, if he can’t see race, he cannot recognize racism. She read this statement not long ago in Robin DiAngelo’s book White Fragility.

Rankine stays in touch with this passenger and, not long after their trip, he reaches out to her. He and his wife have recently read one of Rankine’s books and want to meet with her. She then writes the piece about talking to white men about their privilege. She notifies him of his inclusion in her article. She asks him to respond to her article. He writes back and tells her that she was right to challenge him about not seeing color. He tells her that he’s thought a lot about their conversation. He mentions that he had not accurately recounted his youth in the small town in which he had grown up. He told Rankine that he hadn’t “[noticed] much tension between the black kids and the white kids in [their] town” (49). The man had grown up in a Northeastern, middle-class suburb in the 1980s and early 1990s. He realizes that he had been trying to forget the tension, the easy cruelty that passed from white kids to Black kids. He says that his own family was of first- and second-generation Mediterranean and Eastern European descent. Rankine thinks about Ruby Sales who would say that the man’s comments were the truth about the “culture of whiteness” (50).

A Black male friend of Rankine’s tells her that “white people are taking over antiracism work” (62). He says that white women are running diversity workshops. Rankine wonders what the problem is. Haven’t Black and brown people been saying that it isn’t their job to educate white people about race? Then again, she realizes that, if a Black person isn’t in the room during a diversity workshop, how will anyone point out the things that white people collectively and willfully ignore?

Later, that same day, Rankine asks a white woman friend if white people discuss racism amongst themselves. She says that they do not, but that it’s necessary to combat “their collusion with structural racism” (62). Rankine points out the irony of anti-racist work happening within segregated spaces. Her friend counters that white people are socialized to believe “that white solidarity is the way to organize [their] world,” so, it naturally follows that an “all-white world” is one in which they believe they function best (62).

Soon after Rankine has this conversation, a white male friend of hers attended a diversity workshop run by two white women. There was only one Black faculty member attending the workshop. The facilitators gave them a scenario: While teaching a course on African art, one student remarks that an image of a Black woman reminds him of a monkey. Some students in the course laugh, while others are visibly upset. Those attending the workshop regarded the remark as a joke. Rankine thinks about how jokes can be a way “to own and not to own a moment, a feeling, or a racist feeling” (63).

White supremacists have long compared Black people to monkeys. It’s an old trope. Michelle Obama and comedian Leslie Jones have been compared to apes. In reference to the gubernatorial election, future Florida governor Ron DeSantis encouraged voters not to “monkey this up” (64). He was running against Andrew Gillum, a Black candidate.

Sociologist Benjamin Eleanor Adam writes that, during Google searches for the word “evolution,” the search engine pulls up images of a white man as the apotheosis of evolution. This image connects whiteness to humanity—a notion rooted in racial pseudoscience, which justified centuries of genocide, colonialism, and slavery. Adams posits that this presentation of white men “as the quintessential humans who possess the bodies and behaviors taken to be deeply meaningful human traits” justifies white supremacy (65).

During the diversity workshop conversation, Rankine’s friend reports, the staff concluded that the student should have been given “the benefit of the doubt” (66). Rankine’s friend waits for the white women facilitating the workshop to respond; they do not. Then, he interrupts and points out that the joke is still racist. The sole Black faculty member sided with Rankine’s friend. Then, the others suggested that maybe the student should “be taken aside and spoken to” (66). Rankine thinks that this private act would fail to account for the public distress that such comments can cause.

Rankine has further questions about this workshop scenario. Is the imaginary student white? Who wrote the workshop’s scenario? Is the purpose of these workshops mainly about addressing Black people’s grievances? Weeks earlier, a white woman told Rankine that she had been doing antiracist work since the 1980s and attested that it made no difference.

Rankine goes into her office and ponders a statement that James Baldwin gave during an interview. In the statement, he wonders what white people talk about in unmixed company. He wonders about this because they never seem to find much to say to him. He compares his skin color to “a most disagreeable mirror” (68). He thinks about all the energy that is expended on convincing white Americans that their possible recognition of race has no connection to a bloody and oppressive history. He thinks about how lackadaisical many white people are about changing the present condition, which has resulted from this history, how they choose, instead, not to think about the connection. So, maybe, he posits, their conversations are merely filled with reassuring sounds.