Just Us: An American Conversation

Rankine explores how white supremacy manifests in a variety of shared spaces—airports, private dining rooms, and public streets—to illustrate the ways in which Black people’s movements and speech are frequently circumscribed by racism.

In airports, Rankine expresses her feelings of isolation. She is one of few people of color and one of few women traveling alone and using business class. Most of the other passengers are white men. There is, thus, the suggestion that she is an outlier, though she has paid for a ticket like everyone else. Moreover, airports are transient spaces in which people have come to watch out for potential danger, and to profile Black and brown passengers as potential sources of that danger, due to Western stereotypes about who gets classified as a “terrorist.” Rankine’s anecdote about being flagged frequently by TSA, while a white male passenger never gets flagged, reinforces this. This racial profiling of Black and brown people as terrorists is juxtaposed with white people who have committed racist terrorism for decades, yet are seldom, if ever, profiled as terrorists.

Airline service is another area in which white privilege becomes a factor. The presumption that Rankine has been “let” into first class, as a white male passenger says, connotes that membership in first class is not merely economic to some people.