Just Us: An American Conversation QUOTES

1 " The murkiness as we exist alongside each other calls us forward. I don’t want to forget that I am here; at any given moment we are, each of us, next to any other capable of both the best and the worst our democracy has to offer. "

― Claudia Rankine , Just Us: An American Conversation

2 " Among white people, black people are allowed to talk about their precarious lives, but they are not allowed to implicate the present company in that precariousness. They are not allowed to point out its causes. In “Sexism—a Problem with a Name,” Sara Ahmed writes that “if you name the problem you become the problem.”7 To create discomfort by pointing out facts is seen as socially unacceptable. Let’s get over ourselves, it’s structural not personal, I want to shout at everyone, including myself. "

― Claudia Rankine , Just Us: An American Conversation

3 " What is it we want for our daughter? Perhaps it’s the ability to negotiate the world with an empathic imagination. The thing that brought both my husband and me to the gymnasium is the knowledge that though the deep-seated racist systems are reaffirmed and the evidence is there for us to see, I still want the world for my daughter that is more than this world, a world that has our daughter already in it. "

― Claudia Rankine , Just Us: An American Conversation

4 " Anchored in unknowing, I yearn to rise out of the restlessness of my own forms of helplessness inside a structure that constricts possibilities. "

― Claudia Rankine , Just Us: An American Conversation

5 " Teju Cole writes, “There are no refugees, only fellow citizens whose rights we have failed to acknowledge. "

― Claudia Rankine , Just Us: An American Conversation

6 " Senator Bernie Sanders, who was the hope of so many, considering Democratic losses after the 2018 midterm elections, remarked, “There are a lot of white folks out there who are not necessarily racist who felt uncomfortable for the first time in their lives about whether or not they wanted to vote for an African-American.” How is not voting for someone simply because they’re black not racist? "

― Claudia Rankine , Just Us: An American Conversation

7 " Those who voted in 2016 to be represented yet again by this form of violence, the 62 percent of white men and 47 percent of white women, a plurality, how am I to understand them? "

― Claudia Rankine , Just Us: An American Conversation

8 " this nation is both its credits and debits. "

― Claudia Rankine , Just Us: An American Conversation

9 " People like Ruby Sales, who remains committed to engaging what she names “the culture of whiteness,” always have my undying respect. In 1965, when a white man, Jonathan Daniels, knocked her down thus taking a shotgun blast meant for her, fired by another white man, Tom Coleman, she says she stood between the best and the worst our democracy has to offer. The murkiness as we exist alongside each other calls us forward. I don’t want to forget that I am here; at any given moment we are, each of us, next to any other capable of both the best and the worst our democracy has to offer. "

― Claudia Rankine , Just Us: An American Conversation

10 " Just 2 percent of the world’s population and 5 percent of white people in the U.S. have blond hair, but 35 percent of female U.S. senators and 48 percent of female CEOs at S&P 500 companies are "

― Claudia Rankine , Just Us: An American Conversation

11 " I suppose if all I had to do was bleach my hair blond to stop white supremacists from wanting to burn crosses in my yard, I might consider blondness myself. Certainly, the forty-fifth president and his family understand the importance of the blond signifier in their campaign to Make America Great Again. "

― Claudia Rankine , Just Us: An American Conversation

12 " Her kind of security, because it's not merely monetary, is atmospheric and therefore is not transferable. It's what reigns invisible behind the term "white. "

― Claudia Rankine , Just Us: An American Conversation

13 " People feel hurt when you point out the reality that forms experience because the reality is not their emotional experience. "

― Claudia Rankine , Just Us: An American Conversation

14 " The lack of an integrated life meant that no part of his life recognized the treatment of black people as an important disturbance. To not remember is perhaps not to feel touched by events that don’t interfere with your livelihood. This is the reality that defines white privilege no matter how much money one has or doesn’t have. From Appalachia to Fifth Avenue, my precarity is not a reality shared. "

― Claudia Rankine , Just Us: An American Conversation

15 " Later that same day I ask a white friend about white people speaking among themselves about their racism. It doesn’t happen, she tells me. Nonetheless, she believes, that’s how whites would learn to build stamina regarding their collusion with structural racism. "

― Claudia Rankine , Just Us: An American Conversation

16 " from James Baldwin’s The White Man’s Guilt I have often wondered, and it is not a pleasant wonder, just what white Americans talk about with one another. I wonder this because they do not, after all, seem to find very much to say to me, and I concluded long ago that they found the color of my skin inhibitory. This color seems to operate as a most disagreeable mirror, and a great deal of one’s energy is expended in reassuring white Americans that they do not see what they see. This is utterly futile, of course, since they do see what they see. And what they see is an appallingly oppressive and bloody history, known all over the world. What they see is a disastrous, continuing, present condition which menaces them, and for which they bear an inescapable responsibility. But since, in the main, they seem to lack the energy to change this condition, they would rather not be reminded of it. Does this mean that in their conversations with one another, they merely make reassuring sounds? It scarcely seems possible, and yet, on the other hand, it seems all too likely. "

― Claudia Rankine , Just Us: An American Conversation

17 " the history of experimenting on black people does not hold a place in their referential memory.5 No one makes mention of Tuskegee’s syphilis experiments on black men, or the military experiments of mustard gas on black soldiers, among other nonwhites, or J. Marion Sims’s experimentation on black women.6 No mention of Henrietta Lacks. My historical memory starts tossing examples at me as if it’s having its own dinner party. In the real one, no one wonders what the parents of the black children think when they see the word “study” associated with the center. "

― Claudia Rankine , Just Us: An American Conversation

18 " But all the structures and all the diversity planning put in place to alter those structures, and all the desires of whites to assimilate blacks in their day-to-day lives, come with the continued outrage at rage. All "

― Claudia Rankine , Just Us: An American Conversation

19 " But I still have questions, and the way to get answers is to bear her corrections. "

― Claudia Rankine , Just Us: An American Conversation

20 " Whites are most likely to own their own homes (76%), followed by Asians (61%), Latinos (49%), and blacks (48%). Race matters when it comes to being a homeowner. Being white makes you significantly more likely to own a home than if you are Asian, black, or Latino…. Even though Asians are more likely to be homeowners than blacks and Latinos, given that Asian median income is higher than white median income, we might expect to see even higher homeownership rates for Asians than whites—yet we do not…. Homeownership disparities by race and ethnicity are not solely attributable to differences in income. Even at high income levels, a smaller percentage of blacks and Latinos are homeowners than whites. In 2005, for every income level, black homeownership rates were less than the overall homeownership rates by income. "

― Claudia Rankine , Just Us: An American Conversation