RaveThe New RepublicIn the new book, Rankine tries to account for norms and expectations she worries have escaped scrutiny ... Just Us is best understood as a possible model for the kind of relations Rankine thinks we need to cultivate ... More than a profoundly disruptive social practice, recording and replying to white thoughtlessness as Rankine does is an intervention in the study of whiteness ... That Rankine finds it plausible that white people might rise to this task explains another feature of Just Us: In its invocations of theory, the work waffles. On one hand, Rankine looks to theory in order to explain the workings of whiteness in the world ... Her piece interrogates the practice of seeing with an intensity that would make Simone Browne proud. But it ends abruptly, and Just Us moves on to other, more visceral topics, less suited to intricate theory work ... while that might sound like a criticism, Rankine’s theoretical ambivalence helps Just Us enact its central tension: between reason and reality, between our notions of justice and who we are.
