this initial response with more sustained inquiries
and modes of shifting within their own organiza
tions, corporations and institutions.”
Rankine hopes that Just Us will encourage read
ers to have these deeper and more difficult con
versations. While she finished the book before the
current moment of unrest, its themes have made it
prescient. “I feel as if the book is addressing every
thing that lives below that,” she says of the pan
demic and the protests. “The circumstances that
Just Us addresses haven’t changed.”
The book includes uncomfortable vignettes
from dinner parties, racist writings from Thomas
Jefferson, and data elucidating the wealth gap be
tween Black and white families. It shows how anti
Black racism haunts preschools, college campuses,
police precincts and everywhere in between.
But the part of the book that struck me most
was the essay on blondness that Rankine had men
tioned months back. In it, she traces the preference
for blondness, from Italian Renaissance writers
through Nazi Germany through to the Trump fam
ily. She points out that many of the most famous
blondes, from Marilyn Monroe to Princess Diana,
weren’t actually natural blondes but were just fol
lowing beauty standards.
“If white supremacy and antiBlack racism re
main fundamental structural modes of violence
by which countries continue to govern,” Rankine
writes, “blondness might be one of our most pas
sive and fluid modes of complicity. It points to
white power and its values as desirable, whether
the thought enters one’s head or not.”
Reading the chapter, my pitchblack roots hav
ing once again assumed control of my scalp, I felt a
gut punch. So many seemingly trivial matters are
tied to centuries of oppression—and all of us as in
dividuals are complicit in many of those systems.
But for Rankine, the point isn’t socalled cancel
lation, but interrogation and growth. When I men
tion my shame to her, she laughs it off and then wid
ens the scope of the conversation. “Do whatever you
want,” she says. “But one of the things I’m trying to
say in Just Us is there is a history behind all of our
decisions —and we should make them with the full
consciousness of what that history is.”
‘That was
the most
hope I’ve
felt in a
long time.’
CLAUDIA RANKINE,
on watching the
global protests
following the
murder of
George Floyd
NATHAN BAJAR FOR TIME
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