MixedThe Women\'s Review of BooksWith insistent honesty, Rankine recalls difficult exchanges with white friends, strangers, colleagues, and her spouse, when the weight of whiteness shifts the weather between them ... One uncomfortable truth of this book rubs harshly against this thesis, in itself an unfortunate replication of some of white supremacy’s functions, lives in that \'us.\' Throughout this book, the pronoun \'us\' shapeshifts quietly, obscuring the reader from knowing who exactly is implicated or included in the \'us,\' and who within that \'us\' must carry the bulk of the labor that is unravelling whiteness’s grip on Black Americans’ everyday lives ... the murkiness of the \'us\' harmfully enfolds the responsibility of white Americans to eradicate their racism and the world it has built with the responsibility of Black Americans to do so, which is to say, it suggests that whiteness’s undoing should be at all the project of Black Americans ... Though Rankine’s questioning does rightfully disrupt whiteness’s assumption of neutrality and \'polite\' glossing-over of discomfort around race and is a necessary and brave intervention that is sometimes done in the service of continuing important friendships in her life, it makes one question the implications surrounding this mode of disruption ... For this to be the road to Black and white Americans’ \'new way\' of being in relation to one another would mean the martyring of so many Black people, left on the side of that road as casualties, exhausted and harmed in the pursuit of the unpaid task of conversing whiteness down to its bones with white people who may have only just discovered their own whiteness ... As one piece flowed to the next, I began to feel engulfed in a fog of whiteness that, by the nature of its omnipresence, erased the possibility for Black agency and self-assuredness outside of whiteness’s gaze. This erasure occurs in part through the interjection of fact-checking notes that pop up in the midst of Rankine’s commentary. Although this device appears to be a wry comment on whiteness’s habits of interruption and assumption of authority, the gesture seemed to be directed only toward the white readers sharp enough to catch it, a gotcha moment just for them that waves its arms asking to be seen, saying, look at what you do! It made me wonder who this work is for ... Another complication with the positioning of Rankine’s project is its investment in the neoliberal belief that white racism can be \'solved\' through the appeal to individual white feelings, empathy, and morality ... While seeds of liberation may be planted in the space of polite conversation, I do not believe that it should be the work of Black people to plant them. Instead, I would like to see white people doing this crucial work in their own spaces, families, and communities of planting the seeds that will lead to the end of whiteness itself
