Conversation starter

‘Just Us’ examines what it means to be white in America

THE African American man whose beating by Los Angeles police ignited civil upheaval in 1992 famously asked: “Can’t we all just get along?”

The answer to Rodney King’s question, which has taken on renewed importance these past months: Not yet.

And, as readers learn in “Just Us: An American Conversation,” by Yale University professor Claudia Rankine — an unusual mix of essays, narratives, poems, pictures and musings — we have wide bridges of understanding to build.

Rankine has emerged as one of America’s foremost scholars on racial justice. (The book title, “Just Us,” is also meant to invoke the word “justice.”) Among other places, Rankine is quoted in Layla Saad’s “Me and White Supremacy,” published in January and now a New York Times best-seller.

How we will solve our national racial conundrum emerges in both books as more complicated than Rodney King envisioned. Saad presents a multiple-step plan for acknowledging and treating racism; Rankine offers compelling stories that illuminate, often through conversations with white people, how they have benefited from their skin tone since birth.

Some of these talks are emotionally painful. A seatmate on a long flight later wrote to Rankine that, while he told her on the trip that he “didn’t notice much tension between the Black kids and the white kids in our town,” it was “not that I didn’t notice it so much as I wanted to forget it.”

Justice ignored, though, really is justice denied and never forgotten.

This much seems certain: We delay our day of racial reckoning at our national peril. Recently, The

New York Times reported that President Donald Trump canceled racial sensitivity training for the federal government, calling it “anti-American propaganda.”

Rankine sees it differently. “The more you know, the more possible it is for us to exist in the same reality,” she said.

It’s impossible to read Rankine and Saad’s books and not conclude that we must address, as Rankine writes, the elaborate “set of assumptions, privileges and benefits that accompany the status of being white.”

For example, a white person typically doesn’t have to fear that being pulled over by a police officer could end up as a racial confrontation. A Black person does.

To these and other truths of a past we have avoided reckoning, Rankine will be helping America understand itself, one conversation at a time.

John Lucas In “Just Us,” Yale professor Claudia Rankine asserts that America has wide bridges of racial understanding to build.

“Just Us” by Claudia Rankine (Graywolf, $30)