Just Us: An American Conversation

Rankine is at a dinner party at which the guests are discussing the results of the 2016 presidential election. One guest is writing a book about it, but he is overlooking the role of racism in the outcome. The guest said that “[t]here was no way to predict that white Democrats who had voted for President Obama would vote in key states for a fascist regime” (143). Rankine has heard this before. She thinks of all the unarmed Black people who had been murdered before this election, and Trump’s assertion, before his campaign, that President Obama had not been born in the United States.

Rankine knows that there are other issues—Russian meddling, the Electoral College, and misogyny. She also realizes that her insistence on talking about race is turning her into “the trope of the angry black woman” (143). Being right, however, also sometimes means that you will no longer be allowed to remain in the room. She thinks of the time that Eartha Kitt attended a luncheon at the White House and was subsequently blacklisted for broaching the subject of Vietnam with President Johnson and the first lady.

At the dinner party, a white woman “effectively ends the conversation” about Trump’s campaign by turning everyone’s attention toward dessert (144). Rankine wonders aloud if she’s being silenced. She wants the white woman to admit that her suspicion is right. Instead, the woman slinks down into her chair and looks down into her hands with shame. Rankine is the only Black woman in the house. Someone else steers the conversation away from the brownies on the dessert tray and onto the topic of race as it pertains to children. The question is whether a child study center in a predominately Black area should eliminate the word “study” from its name. Most of the dinner guests seem to think that this is a trivial matter. Rankine thinks of all the instances in which the word has been attached to Black people: the Tuskegee syphilis experiments, mustard gas experiments on Black soldiers and other people of color, J. Marion Sims’s gynecological experiments, and Henrietta Lacks. None of the other guests seem aware of any of this history.

Instead of mentioning these historical memories, Rankine remains silent during the conversation about the study center. Rankine thinks about how, if the woman had simply handed Rankine her coat, she would have smiled in response to the woman’s directness. She would have admired this frankness over the false civility she was actually served.

A white friend of Rankine’s is telling Rankine about an interaction she recently had with her child, who is also white. In class, she said, an Asian boy had told her son that he had “ruined” his illustration of “Goldilocks and the Three Bears” because he had “[colored] Goldilocks’s skin brown” (156). The woman said that her son was baffled and hurt by the other boy’s response.

Rankine thought about what might have been going on in the imagination of this preschool-aged Asian boy. Surely, he had never seen any portrayals of Goldilocks as a brown girl. Rankine then mentions to her friend that children have already formed ideas about race by the time they reach kindergarten. One social psychologist, Kristina Olson, says that “White children in the U.S.., Canada, Australia, and Europe show preferences for other White children” by the ages of three or four (156). This is the result of their modeling their behavior on their surroundings, which often have little to do with what anyone tells them.

Olson’s statistic makes Rankine think of Dr. Kenneth and Mamie Clark’s doll tests, in which Black children always favored the white doll over the black one. This demonstrated the adverse effects of racism on Black children. Now, Rankine wonders about the effects of racism on children who are not Black. Social bias, some psychologists posit, becomes more difficult to reverse as children age.

Rankine notes, too, how teachers often target Black children, particularly Black boys, as causes of classroom disturbances. Another friend of Rankine’s who is Black tells her about an instance when the director of his private school called to tell her that her son had been put out of a classroom for being violent. The four year old had thrown a puzzle piece and pulled a teacher’s hair when she took him out of the classroom. Her friend wants her son to be “in a safe space where he is allowed to have developmentally appropriate toddler tantrums” while also being helped to deal with his feelings (159). When her friend took her son out of the school, his white female teacher cried. She believed that the staff had done nothing wrong.

Rankine relates this episode to a therapist. The therapist suggests that the teacher was sad and gives significance to her tears. Even if the tears were about guilt, the therapist ponders, there is “room for her to be more than one thing” (159). Rankine is taken aback by the question, wondering why she needs to give room to the teacher’s complexity when she couldn’t extend the same courtesy to a four-year-old boy. Rankine is also annoyed by the suggestion that she should have consideration for the teacher’s tears. Still, she doesn’t know if the teacher knows that she failed this little boy. For that to occur, they would need to identify the failure.

Rankine asks her friend what she thought when the white teacher cried. Her friend said that “white female fragility and victimhood” first came to mind (160). Then, she decided to forget about that and focus her energy on her son’s needs. She understands how eagerly others would label him and “adultify [her] four-year-old” (160). She knows that is not as easily recognized as a developing human being, as his white peers are.

Rankine wonders if the tendency of many white adults to harass Black children is really irritation with Black people’s capability to survive.