Just Us: An American Conversation

by Claudia Rankine

I wondered what it would mean to ask random white men how they understood their privilege. I imagined myself—a middle-aged black woman—walking up to strangers to do so. Would they react as the police captain in Plainfield, Indiana, did when his female colleague told him during a diversity training session that he benefited from “white male privilege”? He became angry and accused her of using a racialized slur against him. (She was placed on paid administrative leave and a reprimand was placed in her file.)

today, 64 percent of elected officials are white men, though they make up only 31 percent of the American population? White men have held almost all the power in this country for four hundred years.3

Before the airlines decided frequent travelers need not stand in line, a benefit now afforded to me, I was waiting in another line for access to another plane in another city as another group of white men approached. When they realized they would have to get behind a dozen or so people already in line, they simply formed their own line next to us. I said to the white man standing in front of me, “Now, that is the height of white male privilege.” He laughed and remained smiling all the way to his seat. He wished me a good flight. We had shared something. I don’t know if it was the same thing for each of us—the same recognition of racialized being in the world—but I could live with that polite form of unintelligibility. I found the suited men who refused to fall in line exhilarating and amusing (as well as obnoxious). Watching them was like watching a spontaneous play about white male privilege in one act. I appreciated the drama. One or two of them chuckled at their own audacity. The gate agent did an interesting sort of check-in by merging the newly formed line with the actual line. The people in my line, almost all white and male themselves, were in turn quizzical and accepting. After I watched this scene play out, I filed it away to use as an example in my class. How would my students read this moment? Some would no doubt be enraged by the white female gate agent who let it happen. I would was easier to be angry with her than with the group of men. Because she doesn’t re...

These phrases—white fragility, white defensiveness, white appropriation—have a habit of standing in for the complicated mess of a true conversation.

I asked if he gets flagged by TSA. “Not usually,” he said.7 “I have Global Entry.” “So do I,” I said, “but I still get stopped.” The “randomness” of racial profiling is a phenomenon I could talk about forever, but I stopped myself that day. “Are you able to move in and out of public spaces without being questioned as to why you are there?” I asked. “Do people rush forward asking how they can help you?” I knew the answer to my questions, but I asked them anyway, because I wanted to slow down a dynamic he benefited from. He said he saw my point. I wanted to say, “It’s not my point, it’s our reality,” but the declarative nature of the sentence felt sharp on my tongue.

breast cancer death rates are 40% higher among black women than white women.”

A recent report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, “Inequality in Consumption of Goods and Services Adds to Racial-Ethnic Disparities in Air Pollution Exposure,” found that black people and nonwhite Hispanics disproportionately breathe air polluted by non-Hispanic white people: “Blacks are more exposed than whites/others to pollution from every emitter group.

A white woman effectively ends the conversation on 45’s campaign tactics by turning our gaze toward the dessert tray. How beautiful, she says. Homemade brownies on a silver tray? Hers is the fey gesture I have seen exhibited so often by white women in old movies—women who are overcome by shiny objects. It’s so blatant a redirect I can’t help but ask aloud the most obvious question: Am I being silenced?

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.

In “Sexism—a Problem with a Name,” Sara Ahmed writes that “if you name the problem you become the problem.”7

Chris Rock There ain’t a white man in this room that would change places with me, none of you, none of you would change places with me and I’m rich.

See the essay by art historian Carol Ockman, “Barbie Meets Bouguereau: Constructing an Ideal Body for the Late Twentieth Century,” in The Barbie Chronicles: A Living Doll Turns Forty: “On a trip to Germany, Handler supposedly saw a doll called Bild Lilli, sold principally in smoke shops as a kind of three-dimensional pinup. Based on a comic strip character that appeared in the German newspaper Bild Zeitung, Bild Lilli had a ponytail, feet molded into high heels, and clothes for all occasions. The principal narrative of the comic shows Lilli, scantily clad, in situations were she is taking money from a man. Unlike Barbie, Bild Lilli was not made for children but for men, who displayed her on the dashboard of their cars and, more bizarre still, gave her to their girlfriends instead of flowers or chocolates. Handler decided to reinvent this pornographic caricature as the all-American girl.”