Just Us: An American Conversation

Rankine contemplates photographer Paul Graham’s Woman with Arms Outstretched, an image in his American Night series. The viewer “must travel through a cloudy veil to arrive at a human object” (85). The human being in the center of the photo is a Black woman. Are her arms outstretched in yearning or to signal an arrival? Graham is white. Rankine wonders if the white haze in which the woman stands is a metaphor for what he has been conditioned not to see. Graham says that he “wishes to communicate the difficulty of knowing through seeing” (85).

Rankine is living during a time in which a white terrorist has shot 11 people in a synagogue; neo-Nazis marched through Charlottesville, Virginia, two summers earlier denouncing supposed attempts to replace them; a white nationalist shot two Black people in a Kroger’s supermarket after being unable to enter a Black church; and a white Supremacist “described as having sad eyes” killed nine people in Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church (90).

At her own home, Rankine has been the recipient of hate mail. A white friend advises her against opening packages inside her own home. Another white friend tells Rankine that she has to defend Rankine against charges from her own white friends who think that Rankine is a radical. Rankine tells the woman not to defend her for acting like a human being, for asserting that people should be allowed to live.

Rankine is expected at her daughter’s parent-teacher conference, but she wants to stay home. She goes anyway with her husband, John. He remarks on how he doesn’t see any teachers of color in the school’s gymnasium, where the conference takes place. They eventually find two Black teachers. Both John and Rankine know that their daughter is fond of the school and her instructors.

Rankine wonders if her daughter has the same concerns that Rankine did when she was in high school. She also wonders what she would “need to feel” to believe that her daughter would be allotted the space that she would require just to exist as herself in the classroom (94). Rankine then wonders what she herself would need to feel more at ease.

Rankine’s high school years were defined by white private and Catholic school teachers who “went out of their way to help [her]” (94). Still, for every teacher who was supportive, there were several who rendered her invisible. Even then, when Rankine noticed how they actively ignored her raised hand, she understood their behavior as something typical of white people—an instinctive mode, rather than a responsive one.

Rankine asks a white female friend with three racially diverse children, all now adults, if she had ever worried about her children’s treatment at school. The friend’s children are Black-identified. However, she never worried about their treatment in a predominately white school. Then, she remembers the teacher who asked her how old the children were when she adopted them. The friend realizes that she may have been too naïve to understand the question at the time.

Rankine thinks about “the District 3 public school debate on the Upper West Side and in South Harlem” when a neighborhood full of progressive white people resisted an effort to make 25 percent of their predominately white public middle schools open to Black and brown children (97). The prospective incoming children would have been those who scored below standard on proficiency tests and who qualified for free or reduced-cost lunches. A school principal was flummoxed by the parents’ outrage. His surprise surprised Rankine, who wonders what population the man thought he was working within.

One white parent within the debate claimed that the unprepared students would suffer from “imposter syndrome.” Rankine wonders if the man believed that the children would pretend to be white or pretend to be educated. Another white parent admits that school integration is “scary,” even when it’s the right thing to do. Rankine wonders if he regards “proximity to nonwhites [as] a threat” (98). Then, there are those Black people who are embarrassed by the poverty of other Black people “because they see life through the judging lenses of white discrimination and understand their own exceptionalism as tenuous” (98).

A legislative bill that would have replaced the standardized test and given “the top children from all the city’s middle schools access to free magnet schools” never made it to a vote (99). New York Times reporters Eliza Shapiro and Vivian Wang wrote that some Asian families claimed that Mayor Bill DeBlasio’s plan would discriminate against low-income Asian students. The reporters also noted that, at the elite Stuyvesant High School, only seven seats out of 895 went to Black students in 2019. Rankine concludes that some Asian parents have usurped the “racially coded rhetoric” that one typically hears from white people (99).