Claudia Rankine’s new book is titled Just Us: An American Conversation (Graywolf, Sept. 8). As the subtitle suggests, the theme of conversation runs throughout this complex, multifarious work incorporating poetry, essays, and artwork, plus pages of notes on sources and “fact checks.” How do we talk with one another—Black and White—about race? What gets left unsaid? Why is the conversation so challenging, especially for White Americans? In a starred review, Kirkus calls Just Us a “work that should move, challenge, and transform every reader who encounters it.”

Rankine, 57, is the author of Citizen: An American Lyric—winner of numerous awards, including a National Book Critics Circle Award and a Los Angeles Times Book Prize—and other works of poetry, essays, and plays. She teaches at Yale, is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, and is a founder of the Racial Imaginary Institute, an interdisciplinary collective that explores the role of race in our lives. Her latest play, Help, had just begun performances at The Shed in New York when theaters went dark in response to the Covid-19 pandemic in March.

Rankine and I recently had our own conversation on the subject of race—and her work—on Kirkus’ Fully Booked podcast; she joined me from New Haven, Connecticut, where she lives with her husband, photographer and filmmaker John Lucas, a frequent collaborator. I asked her why the idea of conversation was central to the book and what she wanted to explore through it.

“You come to conversations, usually—like our conversation now—to learn from each other, to build something,” Rankine explained. “Not to be wrong or right but to really construct a world in which I tell you something, you tell me something, and we move forward from that. And that kind of building and mutual interest that governs other conversations seemed to be stalled in talking about race in this country.”

She elaborated: “We have seen that when race is on the table, when we’re talking about White supremacy—notions around White supremacy, racism, inequities—everybody clamps up. And at first I thought it was a kind of belligerence. But I have come to believe that we have such different experiences that when a White person says to me, ‘What do you mean this happens? I can’t believe this happens,’ what they’re really saying to me is, ‘This has never happened to me. And so I find it hard to believe you.’ ”

The book’s opening essay, “liminal spaces i,” is a case in point. The piece is adapted from a New York Times Magazine article in which she described talking about privilege with a number of White men—all of them strangers—whom she encountered in airports and on planes. As you might imagine, the conversations were sometimes uncomfortable, sometimes humorous, and almost always illuminating. Rankine told me that when the piece ran in the Times, she received some 200 letters and more than 2,100 online comments, many from men who thought she “got it wrong.”

“That’s when I made the realization and really understood that when I say White privilege, White men often hear economic privilege,” Rankine explained. “And I’m actually just talking about the privilege to be able to live your life. To have an encounter with the police…or to go to a store and to be able to just go down an aisle, pick something up, pay for it, and leave without somebody following me….Now I’m very careful, and I often say when I use White privilege: I’m talking about the ability to live—just live life.”

If misunderstanding is one obstacle to the conversation about race, civility is another. “Civility is the thing that we have seen used to cover over the portal into real conversations about reality,” as Rankine put it to me. In one of the book’s essays, “social contract,” she recounts a dinner party where the subject of the 2016 presidential election came up, and one guest—who was writing a book on the subject—said Trump had won because of economics, not racism. When Rankine challenged him, another guest abruptly changed the subject by commenting on dessert. Rankine writes, “It’s so blatant a redirect, I can’t help but ask aloud the most obvious question: Am I being silenced?”

“The ramification of that is that I have never been invited to that house again,” Rankine said with a laugh. Had she perhaps pushed the point too far? “I think that when he insisted on the fact that it was all economics, that that was a moment when the violence that’s being done against Black people in the society was being erased,” she said. “I wanted to say, ‘You can’t erase a reality that is very dangerous for immigrants, for Black people, for women, that over 60% of White men voted into power….I think we have to stop feeling like good manners are better than recognizing the inequities and inhumanity that is being brought to huge segments of the society.”

I asked Rankine about the form of Just Us, which, like so much of her work, refuses to adhere to strict genre boundaries or conventions. “I’m a poet by training,” she said, “but I also write essays, and I have written plays. And each genre gives you something different in terms of what it allows. And I thought for this book, it would be really amazing if I could bring all my worlds into the one book—so that Claudia the researcher, the person interested in archival documents, the person who writes poetry, the person who wrote essays could meet inside this inquiry….And it did feel like a big enough subject that it needed everything I knew….I was going to throw the kitchen sink at it.”

We ended our conversation by acknowledging that Just Us—written before the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor and the summer’s mass protests against police brutality—is being published as a different sort of national conversation about race is beginning to take form. “I think that we are in an extraordinary moment,” Rankine said. “What we’ve seen in Portland, what we’ve seen during the protests across the country, is that for the first time people are saying, ‘We’re ready to take on the world in front of us.’ And in order to achieve systemic change inside the various institutions and systems that we have, we’re going to have to start one to one. We’re going to have to start speaking to each other with a shared vocabulary, a shared understanding, a shared recognition of American history. And so I cannot think of a better time to begin to think about having conversations.”

Tom Beer is the editor-in-chief. The full conversation with Claudia Rankine can be heard on the Fully Booked podcast.