Just Us: An American Conversation

In this chapter, which is a poem, Rankine contemplates how gallery spaces are constructed. She regards them as portraits by and of white artists on glaringly white walls. The metaphor of whiteness on whiteness seems to “signal ownership / of all” (172). The gallery space becomes, for Rankine, a space that confirms one culture’s sense of being owed everything. She likens the sense of being white to being embraced, of being protected, even without the advantages of luck and birth. She asserts that even “the myth of meritocracy is fixed / in white” (173). Being white, however, is also like living within a space that walls off others, that blots out others’ dispossession, exhaustion, and despair. The right of rage that white people exercise, Rankine notes, “doubles down on the supremacy / of white in our way” (173).

Rankine is talking to a white friend about “the class breakdown in the television series Big Little Lies” (178). Rankine and this friend live in similar houses. She makes the mistake of putting herself and this woman in the same class as Reese Witherspoon’s character on the show.

Rankine has no inherited wealth and, unlike her friend, had no choice about whether to stay home and forfeit work in favor of raising her child.