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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. It can be hard for Americans of good faith who are trying to grapple with our history and our unfinished business of establishing equality and racial justice. When the president of the United States and the attorney general of the United States publicly dismiss the whole enterprise and really worse than dismiss when they smear the attempt to tell the stories of all Americans as being un-American. They label this patriotic version of history that sweeps the hard stuff about white supremacy under the rug. Instead, the president wants the teaching of history to promote a desired feeling.

President Trump: I'm also pleased to announce that I will soon sign an executive order establishing a national commission to promote patriotic education.

Brian: The president yesterday. What will such a commission do? Apparently not to teach about the human complexity of American history.

President Trump: It will encourage our educators to teach our children about the miracle of American history.

Brian: The miracle of American history. Will the goal be to have the mix of emotions that are complex rendering of history would produce? No.

President Trump: Our youth will be taught to love America with all of their heart and all of their soul.

Brian: I guess this is an example. This summer, demonstrators in Delaware took down a statue of Caesar Rodney, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, because he was also an enslavers of around 200 people at the time, but President Trump said yesterday.

President Trump: I am announcing that the statue of Caesar Rodney will be added to the National Guard of American Heroes.

Brian: He's not just defending existing statues of enslavers and Confederate generals, he's putting new ones up to teach American youth to love America with all their heart and soul. I guess that's the reason, and maybe this love curriculum will teach children of the future this, said by his attorney general this week about lockdowns to protect people from coronavirus.

William Barr: Other than slavery, which was a different kind of restraint, this is the greatest intrusion on civil liberties in American history.

Brian: Curtailing economic activity temporarily to protect people against the virus that has in fact killed 200,000 Americans is the moral equivalent of enslaving millions for your personal gain. It's that kind of subtle understanding of the history of real human beings that the president is running for re-election on. One footnote. Trump's FBI director, Christopher Wray did testify before Congress yesterday about the current terrorist threats to the United States.

Christopher Wray: Lately, we've been having roughly 1000 domestic terrorism investigations a year. It's higher than that this year, a good bit north of 1000 this year. I know that we've had about 120 arrests for domestic terrorism this year. Now, that number of investigations, the 1000+ and the 120 arrests, that's domestic terrorism across the board.

Everything from racially motivated, violent extremists to violent anarchist extremists, militia types, sovereign citizens, you name it. Of the domestic terrorism threats, we, last year, elevated racially motivated violent extremism to be a national threat priority commensurate with homegrown violent extremists. That's the jihadist inspired people here and with ISIS.

Brian: In other words, white supremacists, domestic terrorism is the number one terrorist threat in this country, from the left, is not according to the FBI director. All that is happening as a prelude to my next guest, MacArthur Grant winning poet, Claudia Rankine, whose new book is called Just Us: An American Conversation, or think of it as Just Us: An American Conversation.

Claudia Rankine is the author of six previous books, including The White Card: A Play and Citizen: An American Lyric, which was a New York Times bestseller and winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Los Angeles Times book prize, the Forward prize and many other awards. In 2016, Rankine co-founded the Racial Imaginary Institute. She is a MacArthur fellow and the Frederick Iseman professor of poetry at Yale University. Professor Rankine, always a pleasure. Thank you for coming on.

Claudia Rankine: Thank you, Brian, for having me.

Brian: I'll give you an opportunity to comment on the prelude as we go, but can you first tell us about the one line Richard Pryor reference that gave you the title for your book?

Claudia: It actually didn't give me the title. I had the title Just Us in conversation with the artists Alexandra Bell, who did the Counternarratives, for example, about the New York Times covers, the way in which the story headings might plan towards centering whiteness versus Blackness. I was talking to her about the book and she said, "Did you get the title from Richard Pryor?"

Then I went back to listen to the Richard Pryor and I loved the way the joke "I went down to the courthouse to get justice and realized it was just us." I love the way the just us and the Richard Pryor could mean Black people or white people, that justice could contain those who have justice. It could contain just us, i.e. white people, or I got to the courthouse and found that everybody considered a criminal [unintelligible 00:06:14] just us, Black people. Then I added it to the [inaudible 00:06:19].

Brian: For some context, before we dig into the book further, this book completes a trilogy. I'll tell the listeners that included your previous two works called The White Card: A Play and Citizen: An American Lyric. Would you describe the big sweep of your vision for the trilogy taken as a set?

Claudia: The idea of the racial imaginary looking at that is what does it mean to have race be constructed and then become very real in our daily lives. Whiteness as a constructed thing, Blackness as a constructed thing, and then suddenly Black people moving out of slavery into the 21st century are still held inside of ideas of lesser than, than the construction of whiteness as greater than, as benevolent, as good.

If we investigate that and tie it to the actual history, what do we get? The three books starting with Don't Let Me Be Lonely and then Citizen, now Just Us, our books that tend to just actually go into a line of inquiry around what it means to construct a race and then have to live by that construction, since it's all just people in the end. Now the categories have defined us in terms of certain investments. White supremacy, the foundation of whiteness in this country has determined what white people can have, and slavery and in the afterlife of slavery in this country has determined what Black people have access to.

Brian: I think I put an incorrect book in the trilogy. It includes your book Don't Let Us Be Lonely, not your play The White Card, correct?

Claudia: Yes, exactly. The White Card has its own way of talking to those three books.

Brian: Yes. I guess dealing with the history of race in this country is often seen as dealing with the history of Black Americans, but I think it's fair to say you want this country to deal directly with the history of white Americans, of whiteness, as central to our reckoning, and people are still so uncomfortable with that. Is it accurate or important to put it that way?

Claudia: I think so, because I think that people have a way of believing that racism exists without white people, which when you stand back from that, how does that really work? What's the mathematics behind that? If you just think about race as something, and racial inequities and racial violence against Black people, as just occurring and not understand how the occurrence is justified within the justice system, within the investments of this country in terms of whiteness, then you will never be able to actually address the inequity. Do you see what I mean?

It's like we have been dealing with half of the equation rather than pulling the entire equation forward so we can solve through acts.

Brian: In your opening poem in the book, you seem to reference some of the reactions, many white people might have to being confronted with the idea of studying the history of whiteness as a concept. One line is, if I may read from your work, "How is a call to change named shame, named penance, named chastisement? How does one say 'what if' without reproach?" If that quote is in two out of context, can you tell us why you opened that way?

Claudia: I think people don't like- white people don't like to be called "white Americans." I believe they think, if you named them white Americans, what you're really saying is that it is in line- being white is in line with white supremacy and the centering of whiteness in this country, which is tied historically to slavery and mass incarceration more recently.

The fact of the matter is that's true. Just because you don't name it, doesn't make it any less true. I think people feel- they feel shame attached to this, which, in a sense, they should. Slavery, turning people into property is not a good thing. Then racially profiling them and incarcerating them unjustifiably is nonexistent. I think the shame, it's not nice, but it's true. What we see, especially highlighted in your opening, is this idea that the narrative should be devoid of truth and devoid of history. This notion of a patriotic education that doesn't bring along with it, all of the actual realities and investments of this country seems how a fascist country gets built.

Brian: We'll continue in a minute with poet Claudia Rankine, her latest book Just Us or Just Us: An American Conversation. When we come back, I'm going to invite you, because I know you do, to go beyond the Donald Trump's and the William Barrs who are openly hostile to the kind of American conversation you're trying to have, to people who may not even know that they're hostile. Stay with us, Brian Lehrer on WNYC.

Brian Lehrer on WNYC with Yale poetry professor, poet, playwright, writer, otherwise MacArthur genius, grant winner, Claudia Rankine, her latest collection of poems and prose and documents that she then rifts on is called Just Us: An American Conversation.

As I said before the break, reading the book, it's clear, your goal is to go way beyond the Donald Trumps and William Barrs who are openly hostile to the kind of American conversation you're trying to have beyond the white supremacist terrorists that FBI director Wray was talking about and to get much more liberal or progressive white people to open themselves up beyond polite agreement about Trump, to see their own places in white supremacy today, even if it's passive and unintentional. Am I putting that right?

Claudia: That's exactly right. Recently, I was in conversation with Robin DiAngelo who wrote White Fragility, and she asked me if white liberals were worse than the Donald Trump's, the conservative right. I don't think they're worth because I-- Depending on who's in power, what they implement, have far-reaching effect, but I do think they're more disappointing because what you find often with white liberals is the talk without the action.

The sense of "I want equity, but I'm not willing to do anything that would involve sharing what I have." We've seen this, for example, in the Upper West Side, when there was an attempt to integrate the schools that were majority white and Asian. White, liberal living in those neighborhoods said, "No, I don't want Black and Latinx kids busting to our schools." We're right back in the 1960s again. '50s actually.

I think, what we see with these white liberals is a talk that shows they're well-educated. They know they're supposed to say "African American." They know Black people have been [unintelligible 00:15:20] but they're not willing in any way to actually share the benefits they have received because they themselves are white.

Brian: Near the end of the book, you write about a friend who read a draft of it, and you write a friend finished reading the final pages of Just Us and said, "Flatly, there's no strategy here." No, I asked, "Her impatience had to do with a desire for a certain type of action." How to tell her response is my strategy? Then you go on to say "Our silence or refusal of discomfort, our willful blindness, the shutdown feeling that refuses engagement, the rage that cancels complexity of response are also strategies." Can you talk about how you're using strategy both in your exchange and in the following paragraph?

Claudia: A lot of Black women, I've noticed, are not into Just Us because there's no blueprint for what to do next. It doesn't seem woken up or revolutionary enough, but in a moment of fake news and in the moment where segregationist ideology that has come out of white supremacy is the reigning strategy. I feel that we have to build coalition in order to move forward. We saw in 2016 that Black women, 98% of us voted for Hillary Clinton that did not get her elected.

We cannot face this constitutional crisis without creating coalitions and we cannot create those coalitions with [unintelligible 00:17:14] to talk to people and to find out-- I'm not saying that we will be won. [laughs] I think that is erroneous, but I think that different publics can work together towards strengthening this notion of democracy.

We don't want to find ourselves in 1933 Germany, mindlessly. In order to get beyond this really destructive period that we're in politically, I think that we need to start a conversation that could lead to a Biden, Harris election. Then, that doesn't mean that's over. We'll have to continue pushing that administration towards greater lines of equity within our society at large.

Brian: We just have two minutes, but kind of to that point, I'll mention that your book includes some of your poetry and prose and some other people's work, but also short texts of the words of others, from people's tweets and Facebook posts to a transcript of a police training seminar to the racial breakdown of votes in the 2012 presidential election. Two ton of hostage coats is a little bit of his testimony before Congress about reparations.

One of those pieces of text is simply 2008 and 2012 presidential election results by race, only white people in the majority voted against Barack Obama both times. In fairness, that was true for elections before Obama, and in 2016 too, but I think it shows that white people are both the majority in this country and isolated in their views from the multitude of others, so many others who make up this country, which is a different way to my eye of seeing who's the majority and who's a minority, if you know what I mean. Is that what you're trying to show with those charts at all? We have about 40 seconds.

Claudia: Yes, exactly. White people have said, "We were in a post-race moment with Obama." I'm asking, "How can you even utter that sentence when the majority of white people did not vote for him?" Maybe we just need to look at the facts in order to understand where we want to go in the future.

Brian: We have to leave it there with Claudia Rankine whose new book is Just us: An American Conversation. She has several events coming up. In connection with it, on a virtual bookstore you can see her video from events around the country, but two locally-based talks are part of the PEN out Loud festival on September 29th, and the Brooklyn book fair on October 4th, you can find all those details on her website at Claudia Rankine, that's Rankine with an E at the end, claudiarankine.com, click on Book Tour. Thanks so much for joining us. Always appreciated it a lot.

Claudia: Thanks, Brian. Bye-bye. Take care.

Brian: The Brian Lehrer Show is produced by Lisa Allison, Mary Croke, Zoe Azulay, Amina Srna and Carl Boisrond, with help on our daily politics podcast from Zach Gottehrer-Cohen, and that's Juliana Fonda, and Liora Noam-Kravitz, at the audio controls in person at the WNYC Studios. Have a great weekend, everyone. I'm Brian Lehrer.

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