Claudia Rankine On The Uneasy Conversations Between 'Just Us'

It's Been a Minute

NPR

News, News Commentary, Religion & Spirituality, Society & Culture, Spirituality

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🗓️ 1 January 2021

⏱️ 31 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

After a year that offered many moments of reflection—from the coronavirus pandemic, to protests for racial justice, to the long election season—acclaimed poet Claudia Rankine's latest book offers a framework to process it all. That book is called Just Us: An American Conversation, and in this episode, we revisit her chat with NPR's Audie Cornish. In the book, Rankine has conversations about race with friends and strangers—and learns about herself in the process.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	You're listening to It's Been A Minute from NPR.
0:05.0	I'm Sam Sanders, listeners.
0:07.6	Happy, happy, happy new year.
0:10.7	I hope our 2021 collectively is better than 2020.
0:15.4	And I believe it will be.
0:16.2	I really do.
0:17.5	Anywho, the entire team that makes this show,
0:20.0	we are all taking a break for the holidays
0:23.0	and I hope you are too.
0:24.3	So on today's show, we're going to revisit a conversation
0:27.1	from a few months ago.
0:28.6	It is a chat with the poet, Claudio Rankin.
0:31.2	Claudio's written several books of poetry,
0:33.3	but the one that really put in the spotlight
0:35.2	was a book called Citizen, an American lyric,
0:38.3	came out in 2014.
0:39.9	That book is all about the destructive nature
0:41.7	of casual racism.
0:43.5	And it won a bunch of awards.
0:45.7	Claudio Rankin returned with a new book in 2020.
0:48.5	You probably saw it in a bunch of holiday gift guides.
0:50.9	That book is called Just Us, an American Conversation.
	...

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