November 2020 Read

Published by USC Bedrosian Center on

For the last five months, our most popular episode is our discussion of White Fragility. So … we wanted to bring the conversation further. As, the publisher writes on the blurb for Claudia Rankine’s Just Us, “Claudia Rankine’s Citizen changed the conversation–Just Us urges all of us into it.”

Rankine’s approach to poetry has been described as “mixed media,” or as collage in book form. Those of us in Los Angeles were able to see at how viscerally and beautiful Citizen was transformed into a play. The Fountain Theatre live-streamed a reading in June.

Just Us is an invitation “to discover what it takes to stay in the room together, even and especially in breaching the silence, guilt, and violence that follow direct addresses of whiteness. Rankine’s questions disrupt the false comfort of our culture’s liminal and private spaces–the airport, the theater, the dinner party, the voting booth–where neutrality and politeness live on the surface of differing commitments, beliefs, and prejudices as our public and private lives intersect.”

We hope you will read along with us.

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