Just Us

by Claudia Rankine

  I loved the part in your piece about what a therapist told you about white people dreaming they are black or Jewish as a way of inhabiting pain. I’m sure I’ve told you that, as a child, I read, over and over, every book our local library had on the Holocaust, on US slavery, and also on witch trials and medieval torture devices—I needed scenes on which to hang my sense that people are unbelievably cruel to people close at hand. I didn’t think I was black at the end of the play, but I was all over the place—so sick of white people, so identified with those who feel watched (the black people in the play), so in awe of the play, shaky. Claiming/owning whiteness, in that moment, by getting up, felt hard. I felt glued to my seat. I’m sure there is a lot more to say/think/analyze about all of this but that’s the phenomenological truth of it, for fucked-up and otherwise.

  I appreciated my friend’s response even as I began to engage it critically. But, also, always there remains her life, her experiences that speak back to me. I am in my head and in my heart simultaneously. What I know is I can always ask, even as I’m feeling what I don’t want to feel. I can always ask.

  iii

  From a June 1981 keynote presentation Audre Lorde gave at the National Women’s Studies Association Conference, Storrs, Connecticut.

  Women responding to racism means women responding to anger, the anger of exclusion, of unquestioned privilege, of racial distortions, of silence, ill-use, stereotyping, defensiveness, misnaming, betrayal, and coopting.

  My anger is a response to racist attitudes, to the actions and presumptions that arise out of those attitudes. If in your dealings with other women your actions have reflected those attitudes, then my anger and your attendant fears, perhaps, are spotlights that can be used for your growth in the same way I have had to use learning to express anger for my growth. But for corrective surgery, not guilt. Guilt and defensiveness are bricks in a wall against which we will all perish, for they serve none of our futures.

  Anger is loaded with information and energy. When I speak of women of Color, I do not only mean Black women…. The woman of Color who charges me with rendering her invisible by assuming that her struggles with racism are identical with my own has something to tell me that I had better learn from, lest we both waste ourselves fighting the truths between us. If I participate, knowingly or otherwise, in my sister’s oppression and she calls me on it, to answer her anger with my own only blankets the substance of our exchange with reaction. It wastes energy I need to join her. And yes, it is very difficult to stand still and to listen to another woman’s voice delineate an agony I do not share, or even one in which I myself may have participated.

  And while we scrutinize the often painful face of each other’s anger, please remember that it is not our anger which makes me caution you to lock your doors at night, and not to wander the streets of Hartford alone. It is the hatred which lurks in those streets, that urge to destroy us all if we truly work for change rather than merely indulge in our academic rhetoric.

  This hatred and our anger are very different. Hatred is the fury of those who do not share our goals, and its object is death and destruction. Anger is the grief of distortions between peers, and its object is change. But our time is getting shorter. We have been raised to view any difference other than sex as a reason for destruction, and for Black women and white women to face each other’s angers without denial or immobilization or silence or guilt is in itself a heretical and generative idea. It implies peers meeting upon a common basis to examine difference, and to alter those distortions which history has created around difference. For it is those distortions which separate us. And we must ask ourselves: Who profits from all this?

  I have no creative use for guilt, yours or my own. Guilt is only another way of avoiding informed action, of buying time out of the pressing need to make clear choices, out of the approaching storm that can feed the earth as well as bend the trees. If I speak to you in anger, at least I have spoken to you; I have not put a gun to your head and shot you down in the street; I have not looked at your bleeding sister’s body and asked, “What did she do to deserve it?” This was the reaction of two white women to Mary Church Terrell’s telling of the lynching of a pregnant Black woman whose baby was then torn from her body. That was in 1921, and Alice Paul had just refused to publicly endorse the enforcement of the Nineteenth Amendment for all women—excluding the women of Color who had worked to help bring about that amendment.

  The angers between women will not kill us if we can articulate them with precision, if we listen to the content of what is said with at least as much intensity as we defend ourselves from the manner of saying…. When we turn from anger we turn from insight, saying we will accept only the designs already known, those deadly and safely familiar. I have tried to learn my anger’s usefulness to me, as well as its limitations.

  liminal spaces ii

  What does it mean to re-create conversations in detail in order to unmask—what? The self-positioned? The self in relation to another, an other?

  What lives in the encounter? What’s in the openness of that? Is the important thing what’s said or what goes unsaid? Is the moment the moment before the words are shared or the moment after?

  To live only in the archives of conversations is, perhaps, to see what the culture has formed, willingly. Repeatedly? Sure.

  President Lyndon B. Johnson, who signed the Civil Rights Act in 1964, said to Bill Moyers: If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.

  Eartha Kitt at a 1968 White House luncheon, said to Lady Bird Johnson: You send the best of this country off to a war and they get shot and maimed. They don’t want that…. They rebel in the streets, they will take pot. If you don’t know the expression, it is marijuana.

  In response to Kitt, it was reported that Lady Bird Johnson cried in case anyone failed to hear the harm inflicted by Kitt’s comment.1 The CIA created a dossier on Kitt a week after the luncheon. She was then blacklisted in the United States for the next decade.

  To converse is to risk the unraveling of the said and the unsaid.

  To converse is to risk the performance of what’s held by the silence.

  Thomas Jefferson in Notes on the State of Virginia:

  It will probably be asked, Why not retain and incorporate the blacks into the state, and thus save the expence of supplying, by importation of white settlers, the vacancies they will leave? Deep rooted prejudices entertained by the whites; ten thousand recollections, by the blacks, of the injuries they have sustained; new provocations; the real distinctions which nature has made; and many other circumstances, will divide us into parties, and produce convulsions which will probably never end but in the extermination of the one or the other race.—To these objections, which are political, may be added others, which are physical and moral. The first difference which strikes us is that of colour. Whether the black of the negro resides in the reticular membrane between the skin and scarf-skin, or in the scarf-skin itself; whether it proceeds from the colour of the blood, the colour of the bile, or from that of some other secretion, the difference is fixed in nature, and is as real as if its seat and cause were better known to us. And is this difference of no importance?

  What is wanted? What is being said, what is being shared, what is being known for all time?

  Starbucks employee to 911 operator: Hi, I have two gentlemen at my café that are refusing to make a purchase or leave. I’m at the Starbucks at 18th and Spruce.

  What is the “never” at the center of the moment, what is the “never again,” what is the “not,” the “no” in the utterance?

  Are conversations desire projected? Is conversing a dance? The back-and-forth, a chance? To take? Or be taken? To be taken away? Taken out?

  What is being threatened? What is being defended? What is being taken away? Is everything being taken away? What is it?

&n
bsp; What is offended? Offensive? Is it simply because I am? Or, because you are? Am I in your way? That you step in my way? Do I know you? Can I know you? In your ways? Anyways?

  HILARY BROOKE MUELLER: You can film me. That’s fine—

  D’ARREION TOLES: I understand, ma’am, but you’re blocking me.

  MUELLER: Into my building.

  TOLES: OK, and it’s my building as well, so I need you to get out my way and—

  MUELLER: OK, what unit?

  TOLES: I don’t need to say that information, so ’scuse me, ma’am.

  MUELLER: I’m uncomfortable.

  TOLES: Excuse me. OK, you can be uncomfortable, that’s your discretion. You’re uncomfortable ’cause of you. I need you to move out of my way, please.

  MUELLER: No.

  Just us, just people, the same people, but what is it that the just people are feeling or wanting or being? The brouhaha so brutal, rising, rising up, rise up.

  What rises up within, between us? What comes up because we are the history within us?

  911 OPERATOR: San Francisco 911. What’s the exact location of your emergency?

  ALISON ETTEL: I’m on the sidewalk. Hi. I’m having someone that does not have a vendor permit that’s selling water across from the ballpark.

  OPERATOR: Uhhh …

  ETTEL: Do you have someone I can talk to about that?

  OPERATOR: Okay, one second. Let me transfer you over to the police department. Hang on.

  ETTEL: Great, thank you.

  ETTEL: Hi. I’m having someone that, um, does not have a vendor permit that’s selling water across from the ballpark.

  What is the incoherence that calls? What calls by name, what makes the feeling rage? What makes the feeling the sureness of ignorance, the blindness of frost? The lawlessness of loss?

  Unidentified white woman: It don’t bother me if I say it and I don’t care if everybody hears me. I think everybody here feels the same way I do, Go back to wherever the fuck you come from, lady.

  A force within the whiteness is forcing the whiteness.

  What is the feeling that pulls, that is pulling, that pulls it out, what sensation uncivilized the utterance? What? What dragged us, just us, here? What is the justice wanted?

  Then the black person is asked to leave to vacate to prove to validate to confirm to authorize to legalize their right to be in the air in air in here and then the police help help is called help help the police is called the police help help.2

  More often than not the police back up support reinforce the claims of the person who calls called them in the whiteness of truth the whiteness of victimhood in the whitening benefit of the doubt in the whiter-than-white explanation of.

  EARL:

  They’re not loitering.

  JM:

  How am I loitering in an area that’s public?

  EARL:

  You’re sitting here.

  JM:

  So this area is off limits after a certain time?

  EARL:

  Only if you are a guest.

  JM:

  I am a guest.

  EARL:

  You didn’t tell me that.

  JM:

  I said that I am a guest I told you that.

  EARL:

  I asked what room you are in you refused.

  JM:

  I am in 5 something I just checked in today, here’s my ticket, my uh, room, just checked in with my American Express and these gentlemen are harassing me.

  LOUIS:

  No one is harassing you man.

  JM:

  You are.

  LOUIS:

  I am just trying to get to the bottom of it.

  JM:

  There is nothing to get to the bottom of, sir. Do you want to check and see if I am a guest?

  LOUIS:

  That’s why I ask you, man. I’m trying to help you out here, bro.

  JM:

  No, I’ll like to see the cops. Let the cops come, please.

  LOUIS:

  That’s fine. All right.

  EARL:

  See what I am dealing with.

  JM:

  You guys are crazy

  …

  JM:

  Because Earl told me I need to leave?

  POLICE:

  Earl is in control of the property, yeah.

  JM:

  So Earl runs this place …

  POLICE:

  He does right now.

  JM:

  I am sitting here taking a phone call …

  POLICE:

  You can narrate this …

  The police they believe the police believe the president the history the education the media what entertainment taught them the world they know the worst they carry.

  That’s how we know this is not a mental health issue. This is not an isolated issue. This is not deserving of or serving us.

  NOTES

  1. Text In response to Kitt, it was reported that Lady Bird Johnson cried.

  Fact Check No. This may be true, but both sides allegedly later deny that she actually cried.

  Notes and Sources According to a USA Today report titled “Eartha Kitt’s Vietnam Comments Nearly Ended Her Career,” Lady Bird Johnson wrote in a private diary that “one paper said that I was pale and that my voice trembled slightly as I replied to Miss Kitt. I think that is correct. I did not have tears in my eyes as another paper said.” Kitt’s daughter told the paper that “my mother said she never saw tears.”

  2. Text … the police help help is called help help the police is called the police help help.

  Notes and Sources Zak Cheney-Rice, “NYPD Union Lawyers Argue That Eric Garner Would’ve Died Anyway Because He Was Obese,” New York magazine: “Pantaleo’s defense team has claimed consistently that Garner was responsible for his own death. Were he not overweight and asthmatic, they argue, he would have survived the violence to which he was subjected. While it may seem odd to suggest that a victim’s physical health should be used to exonerate someone who choked and killed him, it is consistent with the logic applied to many cases where police skate for killing unarmed civilians—many of which hinge on how the victims might have prevented themselves from dying in the first place, whether by maintaining better physical fitness in Garner’s case, or appearing less scary to police, as in the cases of Michael Brown, Terence Crutcher, and others.”

  josé martí

  An older white man tells the table his son will be shipping out again soon. He believes in the importance of military service, but that doesn’t stop him from being anxious about his son’s life. The white, female judge sitting next to me sympathizes with his position. She knows how he feels. Her son is moving to Brooklyn. Brooklyn? I sit quietly thinking of all the euphemisms whites use to pull forward white people’s fantasy of black content, or is it my fantasy of their fantasy? Disagreeable content. Dangerous content. Fearful content. Brooklyn. She worries that her son will be killed. Killed by whom? My fantasy or her fantasy? Have you been to Brooklyn lately?1

  Why doesn’t the judge say what she means? I’m aware I am struggling to stay silent at this moment. Do I engage the racism she might believe justified? Does she know a white person like her son who was murdered or robbed or even harmed in Brooklyn? Did she sentence enough Brooklynites to cement an equation between Brooklyn and war zone? Is my fantasy of her framed mostly by what I know about the justice system? Have I read The New Jim Crow too many times? Have I followed Bryan Stevenson’s career too closely? Am I making a leap that doesn’t exist? She implied Brooklyn might kill her son; she didn’t say black, she didn’t say Caribbean, she didn’t say Latinx. What other communities do I know in Brooklyn? The Hasidic Jewish community? The Eastern Europeans? The Dominicans? The Koreans? Who is not living there? How sure can I be of what she meant? No one else at the table laughs at her statement. Am I projecting onto her without merit? Should I ask her if she fears her son will be killed by another gentrifying white male since most victims and sus
pects are neighbors?

  How far away can I get from confrontation by using the language of inquiry? Where are you going with this analogy? Where have we landed with this comparison that is no comparison, Judge? Because I know, had 2016 gone differently, this white, female judge could now hold a position in our government, and we would all think that was better than what we received at the time, and it would seem better than what we got, I am falling forward into my own deep awareness of how hopelessly white and seemingly racist our hope remains. Am I wrong? Brooklyn, not black.

  And whatever she meant, she is not the exception. Senator Bernie Sanders, who was the hope of so many, considering Democratic losses after the 2018 midterm elections, remarked, “There are a lot of white folks out there who are not necessarily racist who felt uncomfortable for the first time in their lives about whether or not they wanted to vote for an African-American.” How is not voting for someone simply because they’re black not racist? Though Sanders was not shy in labeling Brian Kemp’s and Ron DeSantis’s campaigns racist (in his own tweet, he said, “One ad the Republicans put out was even rejected by Fox television because of its racist content…. In Florida, Andrew Gillum, whom I was proud to stand with even during the primaries, faced week after week of racism from his opponent and allied forces. That’s just a fact. And in the end, I believe those craven attacks founded in ‘fear of the other’ had an impact on the outcome. Stacey Abrams faced similar attacks, in addition to unprecedented voter suppression. That’s a reality that has to change”), even he appeared to stop short when it came to labeling potential white voters as racist.