Claudia Rankine - Just Us

CLAUDIA RANKINE

Graywolf Press

Copyright 2020 by Claudia Rankine

Permission acknowledgments appear on pp.

The author and Graywolf Press have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the authors copyright, please notify Graywolf Press at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.

This publication is made possible, in part, by the voters of Minnesota through a Minnesota State Arts Board Operating Support grant, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund. Significant support has also been provided by Target, the McKnight Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, the Amazon Literary Partnership, and other generous contributions from foundations, corporations, and individuals. To these organizations and individuals we offer our heartfelt thanks.

Published by Graywolf Press

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Minneapolis, Minnesota 55401

All rights reserved.

www.graywolfpress.org

Published in the United States of America

Printed in Canada

ISBN 978-1-64445-021-5

Ebook ISBN 978-1-64445-119-9

2 4 6 8 9 7 5 3 1

First Graywolf Printing, 2020

Library of Congress Control Number: 2019956891

Jacket design: John Lucas

Jacket art Nona Faustine

You go down there looking for justice, thats what you find, just us.

Richard Pryor

For Us

What does it mean to want

an age- old call

for change

not to change

and yet, also,

to feel bullied

by the call to change?

How is a call to change named shame,

named penance, named chastisement?

How does one say

what if

without reproach? The root

of chastise is to make pure.

The impossibility of thatis that

what repels and not

the call for change?

There is resignation in my voice when I say I feel

myself slowing down, gauging like a machine

the levels of my response. I remain within

so sore I think there is no other way than release

so I ask questions like I know how

in the loneliness of my questioning.

Whats still is true; there isnt even a tremor

when one is this historied out.

I could build a container to carry this being,

a container to hold all, though we were never

about completeness; we were never to be whole.

I stand in your considered thoughts also broken,

also unknown, extending

one sentencehere, I am here.

As Ive known you, as Ill never know you,

I am here. Whatever is

being expressed, what if,

I am here awaiting, waiting for you

in the what if, in the questions,

in the conditionals,

in the imperativeswhat if.

What if over tea, what if on our walks, what if

in the long yawn of the fog, what if in the long middle

of the wait, what if in the passage, in the what if

that carries us each day into seasons, what if

in the renewed resilience, what if in the endlessness,

what if in a lifetime of conversations, what if

in the clarity of consciousness, what if nothing changes?

What if you are responsible to saving more than to changing?

What if youre the destruction coursing beneath

your language of savior? Is that, too, not fucked up?

You say, if other white people had not or if it seemed like

not enough I would have

What ifthe repetitive call of what ifis only considered repetitive

when what if leaves my lips, when what if is uttered

by the unheard, and what if

what if is the cement of insistence

when you insist what if

this is.

What is it we want to keep conscious, to stay known, even as we say, each in our own way, I so love I know I shrink Im asked Im also I react I smell I feel I think Ive been told I remember I see I didnt I thought I felt I failed I suspect I was doing Im sure I read I needed I wouldnt I was I shouldve I felt I couldve I never Im sure I ask

You say and I say but what

is it we are telling, what is it

we are wanting to know about here?

What if what I want from you is new, newly made

a new sentence in response to all my questions,

a swerve in our relation and the words that carry us,

the care that carries. I am here, without the shrug,

attempting to understand how what I want

and what I want from you run parallel

justice and the openings for just us.

In the early days of the run- up to the 2016 election, I was just beginning to prepare a class on whiteness to teach at Yale University, where I had been newly hired. Over the years, I had come to realize that I often did not share historical knowledge with the persons to whom I was speaking. Whats redlining? someone would ask. George Washington freed his slaves? someone else would inquire. What are Shirley Cards and how did they determine what was the correct skin tone balance? yet another person wondered. But as I listened to Donald Trumps inflammatory rhetoric during the campaign that spring, the class took on a new dimension. Would my students understand the long history that informed a comment like one Trump made when he announced his presidential candidacy? When Mexico sends its people, theyre not sending their best, he said. Theyre sending people that have lots of problems, and theyre bringing those problems with us. Theyre bringing drugs. Theyre bringing crime. Theyre rapists. When I heard those words, I wanted my students to track immigration laws in the United States. Would they connect the current treatment of both documented and undocumented Mexicans with the treatment of Irish, Italian, and Asian people in the last century?

In preparation, I needed to slowly unpack and understand how whiteness was created. How did the Naturalization Act of 1790, which restricted citizenship to any alien, being a free white person, develop over the years into our various immigration acts? What has it taken to cleave citizenship from free white person? What was the trajectory of the Ku Klux Klan after its formation after the end of the Civil War, and what was its relationship to the Black Codes, those laws subsequently passed in Southern states to restrict black peoples freedoms? Did the United States government bomb the black community in Tulsa, Oklahoma, also known as Black Wall Street, in 1921? How did Italians, Irish, and Slavic peoples become white? Why do people believe abolitionists could not be racist?