Time September 21/September 28, 2020people we live among?” she says.
I first met her on a frigid day back in February,
when the world was buzzing about as usual, and
she was preparing for the premiere of her play Help
at the Shed in Manhattan, which portrays fraught
encounters with white men around the world.
While I had many lofty questions prepared for her,
Rankine initially just wanted to talk about my hair.
I had recently dyed it bleach blond, inspired by
Frank Ocean, BTS’s RM, and an unholy mixture of
curiosity and boredom. Rankine, smirking slightly,
took pictures of my desiccated strands, saying she
had written an essay about “whether people con-
sider blondness in terms of whiteness.”
I was startled by the sentence and, frankly, a
little defensive. What did my dyeing my hair, on
a whim and inspired by artists of color, have to do
with whiteness or reinforcing racist systems?
I didn’t press the issue, and any chance for a
follow- up conversation evaporated when COVID-
quickly began spreading across the U.S. Help closed
after two previews; Rankine went back home to
New Haven, Conn., where she is a professor of
poetry at Yale. She was staying at home—a previous
bout with cancer made her a higher risk for severe
illness from COVID-19—when in May, new videos
showing threats or violence against Black people
began to spread across the Internet. These videos
were grief- inducing to Rankine. “For all of these
deaths, you feel the same depth of devastation,”
she says.
But she also recognized that they revealed, to a
captive world, the array of indignities and dangers
that Black people can face on a daily basis. “The
Amy Cooper video was, to me, a real gift to society,
with her performance of fear, her uses of civility,”
she says. “I hope it gets taught in classes. This kind
of white woman who weaponizes her fear in an at-
tempt to have Black people murdered: we’ve seen
it again and again.”
Over the next few months, Rankine watched in
amazement as rhetoric about whiteness and racism
that might have previously been perceived as radi-
cal now began to receive support in mainstream
discourse. She celebrated as books about racism
and anti racism, from Robin DiAngelo’s White
Fragility to Ibram X. Kendi’s How to Be an Anti
racist, surged to the top of the best-seller lists.
“White men and women are beginning to have
a shared understanding and a shared vocabulary
for what’s going on,” she says. “I don’t feel like I’m
starting at the beginning in these conversations.”
Despite this progress, however, Rankine knows
that the country still has miles to go in terms of
fully confronting its racist past, especially with a
current leadership that often defends white su-
premacists. “For some people, it is a PR moment,”
she says. “We’ll see whether people will follow upThe auThor and poeT Claudia rankine
witnessed the collective muted response after
James Byrd Jr. was dragged to death along an as-
phalt road in Texas in 1998. She watched wide-
spread resistance rise against the nascent Black
Lives Matter movement in 2013 and 2014 follow-
ing the murder of Trayvon Martin. Whenever she
wrote books or essays about white privilege or rac-
ism, she expected to receive waves of denial or per-
sonal attacks, because she knew how white people
deny white privilege and Black death.
So she was surprised when in late May, white
people stormed the streets alongside people of
color across the world to protest racial violence
and injustice following the murder of George
Floyd. “That was the most hope I’ve felt in a long
time,” Rankine says in a phone interview. “I think
we are suddenly seeing the same reality.”
Rankine’s life’s work has been driven by
getting people to understand these grim realities.
In searing works like Don’t Let Me Be Lonely
and Citizen—which was a National Book Award
finalist—she has explored how anti-Black racism
has manifested in ways both mundane and tragic.
For many years, it seemed as if Rankine was
screaming into the void, laying bare a version of
America that many people refused to accept. But
Just Us, her new work of poetry, personal essays
and historical documents, arrives into a changed
climate, in which many people are finally coming
to grips with uncomfortable truths.
Still, Rankine argues in the book that Ameri-
cans have a long way to go toward understanding
how deeply anti-Black racism is embedded into
nearly every aspect of our society, from corporate
culture to classrooms to even hair color. “It’s really
a moment for us to slow down and understand that
a white- supremacist orientation has determined
almost everything in this country,” Rankine says.
“For us to reroute, we have to ask more questions
and really be uncomfortable.”
Rankine was boRn in Kingston, Jamaica, and
immigrated at the age of 7 with her parents to
the Bronx, where she says racism was palpable
but mostly latent. While Rankine was an
acclaimed poet in the early ’90s, her work took
on increased urgency and focus after she learned
of Byrd’s lynching: “I just thought, Who are these
RANKINE
QUICK
FACTS
Formative
voices
Early in
Rankine’s
career as a
young writer
and poet, her
influences
included
Fyodor
Dostoyevsky,
César Vallejo,
Toni Morrison,
bell hooks and
W.B. Yeats.30,
Number
of copies
shipped this
summer of
Citizen, her
book of poetryThoughts on
Hamilton
“It’s really,
really good.
It just doesn’t
do anything to
problematize
the real
problems of
the period
that it
represents.”As America approaches
raw truths about race,
Claudia Rankine is
ready to guide us
By Andrew R. Chow
TheBrief TIME with ...