Just Us: An American Conversation

by Claudia Rankine

Normally, I would never say a particular white man stands in for white men, because I know better. I have watched white people reduce black people not to a single black person but to a single imagined black person, imagined animal, imagined thing, imagined ignoramus, imagined depravity, imagined criminality, imagined aggressor, superpredator, imagined whore, imagined poverty queen, imagined baby maker, imagined inferior being in need of everything belonging to white people including air and water while stealing everything belonging to white people including air and water and on and on toward an imagined no one.2 All this wouldn’t matter if this same category of white people weren’t strategizing tests, writing exams, grading exams, funding schools, granting bank loans, selling property, making laws, suppressing voters, determining sentences, evaluating pain, teaching classes, creating and perpetuating master narratives, hiring, firing, demoting, killing imagined me.3 Institutional whiteness has stereotyped blackness and used this particular image to murder by. Given that process, if systemic change is what is wanted, “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house,” as the poet Audre Lorde took the time to tell us.