Guide to Source Material for Anti-Racist Activists and Thinkers

Just Us is an invitation to discover what it takes to stay in the room together, even and especially in breaching the silence, guilt, and violence that follow direct addresses of whiteness. Rankine's questions disrupt the false comfort of our culture's liminal and private spaces--the airport, the theater, the dinner party, the voting booth--where neutrality and politeness live on the surface of differing commitments, beliefs, and prejudices as our public and private lives intersect. This brilliant arrangement of essays, poems, and images includes the voices and rebuttals of others, all running alongside fact-checked notes and commentary that complements Rankine's own text, complicating notions of authority and who gets the last word.

"Claudia Rankine’s first published play, The White Card, poses the essential question: Can American society progress if whiteness remains invisible?"--Publisher's Website. The play, composed of two scenes set a year apart, centers around conversation between Charlotte, a Black woman artist, and Virginia and Charles, white patrons of the arts.

Claudia Rankine's bold recent book recounts mounting racial aggressions in ongoing encounters in 21st century daily life and in the media. The accumulative stresses come to bear on a person's ability to speak, perform and stay alive. Our addressability is tied to the state of our belonging, Rankine argues, as are our assumptions and expectations of citizenship. In essays, images and poetry, Citizen is a powerful testament to the individual and collective effects of racism in our contemporary society.

The award-winning poet Claudia Rankine, well known for her experimental multigenre writing, fuses the lyric, the essay, and the visual in this politically and morally fierce examination of solitude in the rapacious and media-driven assault on selfhood that is contemporary America. With wit and intelligence, Rankine strives toward an unprecedented clarity-of thought, imagination, and sentence-making-while arguing that recognition of others is the only salvation for ourselves, our art, and ourgovernment. Don't Let Me Be Lonely is an important new confrontation with our culture, with a voice at its heart bewildered by its inadequacy in the face of race riots, terrorist attacks, medicated depression, and the antagonism of the television that won't leave us alone.