Just Us is about intimacy. Rankine is making an appeal for real closeness. She’s advocating for candor as the pathway to achieving universal humanity and authentic love.

If Just Us extends Citizen’s effort to “pull the lyric back” into reality, it may succeed too well. Rankine cedes large swaths of her imagination to mourning the constraints placed on it, and her self-subordination—to white people, especially—hardens many of the certainties that her art aims to unsettle. The book returns often to the phrase “what if,” but it feels besieged by “what is”: unfreedom is the point, as is a shift in the “American conversation” from hope to a kind of dignified resignation.

The book, fittingly, feels utterly of the mind, with its anxious inquiries and connections and diversions, not to mention all of Rankine’s brilliance—but for that same reason it can feel incoherent, insulated and disconnected from the world it depicts.

Claudia Rankine solidifies her position as one of our time’s most incisive, brilliant and necessary intellectuals. We often hear that a book is necessary; but Rankine redefines that term. Just Us is a work that challenges binary thought to such a degree as to break the world (and the reader) open in new ways, allowing space for real, considered transformation.

Employing her signature collagelike approach, she avoids polemics, instead earnestly speculating about the possibility of interracial understanding.

In her latest book, Just Us: An American Conversation, she invites readers to stand in for her discomfited students.

The Yale professor, MacArthur fellow, and celebrated artist lays out exactly what it is like to be Black/female/famous/acclaimed/othered in elite white spaces. She is precise in her naming of the things that go on there...Her insights are many.

With insistent honesty, Rankine recalls difficult exchanges with white friends, strangers, colleagues, and her spouse, when the weight of whiteness shifts the weather between them.

... necessary and maddening. As anyone who has read her would expect, screenshots, tweets, historic civil-rights photos, demographic charts, and many other types of images are strategically interspersed throughout the text. What sets this book apart from her past work, though, is its overwhelming emphasis on straight prose instead of poetics.

... an unusual mix of essays, narratives, poems, pictures and musings.

If these anecdotes illuminate nothing new, at least, for Rankine, they affirm the possibility of interacting with strangers.

... the precision remains. Thinking out each step of her reflections, Rankine demonstrates Gertrude Stein’s belief that 'sentences are not emotional but paragraphs are'.

... invites and rewards attention. And it seeks out not only understanding, but the ways in which that understanding might emerge.

Rankine’s commitment to conversation as the threshold of political transformation is rooted in a deep investment in the possibility of rewiring the social contract, the unspoken agreement about civility that is also a formative democratic principle.

In the new book, Rankine tries to account for norms and expectations she worries have escaped scrutiny.

Rankine thinks associatively rather than sequentially, so the book is episodic rather than arranged as an argument or a narrative with a narrative arc like, say, Ibram Kendi’s polemic.

Rankine’s representation of loneliness was always political as well as personal.

The book pierces the abstraction of whiteness as Rankine confronts it in real, fraught physical spaces—airports, schools and suburban neighbourhoods via emergency calls to 911 operators — by asking simple, devastating questions.

If Rankine’s essays are wide-ranging (blondness, police violence, Latinx stereotypes) and well researched, they’re also conversational and personal.

Rankine presents another arresting blend of essays and images, perfectly attuned to this long-overdue moment of racial reckoning. In language all the more devastating for its simplicity, Rankine analyzes the overwhelming power of whiteness in everyday interactions.

[A] unique and powerful meditation on the challenges of communicating across the racial divide in America.

Rankine writes with disarming intimacy and searing honesty about pointed exchanges with White friends and colleagues, fissures within her marriage, and encounters with White strangers who assume some sort of superiority of rank.