“I was sailing closer and closer to the trope of the angry black woman,” Rankine recounts. At one gathering, Rankine challenges a man about the 2016 election: his theory of Trump’s win seems to elide the role of racism. Rankine attends a lot of dinner parties (perhaps too many, it must be said) and is repeatedly subjected to white people stepping in it, thanks to a combination of willed oblivion and condescension. “Just Us” describes a series of racialized encounters with friends and strangers. The subtitle of “Citizen” was “An American Lyric.” Rankine’s new collection, “ Just Us,” is subtitled “An American Conversation”-the transparent eyeball has acquired ears and a tongue. Rankine wrote poetry that was always slipping toward the next shape, the one that only she could see. The book’s narrator found words for the pain of racism, and little seemed lost in the translation but there was, too, an aura around that pain, a ripple of reinvention. Rankine has said that she wanted to “pull the lyric back into its realities,” and “Citizen” struck a delicate balance between the world that Rankine dreamed about and the one that she saw. Her focus fell on what it means to be erased, projected upon, or politicized, and how the cumulative effect can shatter one’s sense of self. In her book-length poem “ Citizen,” from 2014, the writer Claudia Rankine probed some of the nuances and contradictions of being a Black American. Claudia Rankine’s interest in the white part of “us” turns her into an anthropologist.
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