Hannah Black Finds Trick Questions in Claudia Rankine's Just Us
Hannah Black reviews Claudia Rankine's much-anticipated Just Us: An American Conversation (Graywolf) for Bookforum's fall issue. "Little good comes of constantly questioning what you already know to be true, but doubt has its secret advantages," writes Black. A further excerpt:
…Just as indecision is the superficial appearance of a decision that you are not yet ready to own, Rankine’s ever-present uncertainty is a defense against unbearable certainties, against a white indifference that she describes as “impenetrable and reliable and distributed across centuries.” Disappointed in a white friend, she asks herself: “Why can’t she see it matters? Does it matter?” In this case, the friend gives a substantial reply, explaining that she chose not to participate in the clunky-sounding interactive ending of Jackie Sibblies Drury’s play Fairview because “situations . . . manufactured specifically to elicit white shame . . . make me uneasy—I feel like unholy transactions are in the offing, like white moral masochism is getting a thrill.” This feels lightly ironic, given that white moral masochists are the only readers one can imagine being really thrilled by the book’s implicit exhortation that we all have awkward conversations about race without changing anything else about our lives. What distinguishes Just Us from emotional safari is its deep ambivalence, an affect that moral masochists are often blithely unable to detect.
More often than not, Rankine’s questions come without answers. Apparently “American conversation” is, like American cheese, an ersatz of the original. At times it is hard to distinguish between outer and inner question, between a question demanding an answer and a question that Rankine has asked only herself. Sometimes she poses questions that are gratifyingly more like confrontations, as when she asks, at yet another horrible dinner party, “Am I being silenced?” Some important questions are only asked obliquely, such as why Rankine feels she has to keep going to the horrible dinner parties: “Why not want the thing [access to white institutions] that offers the most lasting and stable, if at times toxic and dehumanizing, value?” And the questions’ assumptions are not always unpacked: it might in fact be destabilizing to be at times dehumanized. Some questions are long and breathless: “But if you’re white and you’re getting messages from your surroundings that reaffirm the idea that white solidarity is the way to organize your world, even while doing antiracist work, then how are you not going to believe that a constructed all white world isn’t you at your most functioning?” Some have a paragraph all to themselves: “If the structure that structures the scenario is itself racist, are the questions trick questions?”
Rankine’s questions anticipate what they also posit as impossible—a sympathetic hearing, a real answer—and so all are trick questions. A brief escape from the interrogative toward the end of the book is a welcome break…
Read on at Bookforum.