Just Us: An American Conversation Themes

Claudia Rankine
This Study Guide consists of approximately 54 pages of chapter summaries, quotes, character analysis, themes, and more - everything you need to sharpen your knowledge of Just Us.

Just Us: An American Conversation Themes

Claudia Rankine
This Study Guide consists of approximately 54 pages of chapter summaries, quotes, character analysis, themes, and more - everything you need to sharpen your knowledge of Just Us.
This section contains 2,704 words
(approx. 7 pages at 400 words per page)
Buy the Just Us: An American Conversation Study Guide

Whiteness and White Supremacy

Through this theme, the author explores whiteness as a social construct that is revered and aspired to in the United States, to the extent that its opposite—blackness—is reviled. In “liminal spaces i,” Rankine mentions that she is teaching a class at Yale University on whiteness and that she is often surprised at the historical ignorance of her students. She explains that the concept of “critical whiteness studies” gained traction in the 1980s-90s as a means “to make visible a history of whiteness that through its association with 'normalcy' and 'universality' masked its omnipresent institutional power” (17). The notion of whiteness as the “norm” suggests that non-white people are abnormal and ultimately inferior. She explains that the U.S. has a long history of enshrining white supremacy into law, from the Naturalization Act of 1790, which restricted immigration to “free white person[s]” (15) to the...

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This section contains 2,704 words
(approx. 7 pages at 400 words per page)
Buy the Just Us: An American Conversation Study Guide
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