Claudia Rankine on What It Means When a White Person “Doesn’t See Color”

Bookable features established authors and emerging talent in conversation with host and author Amanda Stern, perhaps best known for creating the Happy Ending Music & Reading Series at New York’s famous Joe’s Pub and Symphony Space. With an immersive sound experience designed around each episode, Bookable takes you on an audio exploration of a book—usually new, sometimes classic and occasionally obscure but always worth knowing about.

The United States is experiencing a time of reckoning, but too often it seems like we’re all talking past each another other rather than attempting meaningful dialogue. In Just Us, Claudia Rankine provides a blueprint for how we talk about and experience race in America. Listen as she and Amanda examine the emotions underpinning white privilege, shine a light on racial inequality in its less obvious forms, and explain what it actually means when a white person, “doesn’t see color.”

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Claudia Rankine is the author of Citizen: An American Lyric and four previous books, including Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric. Her work has appeared recently in the Guardian, the New York Times Book Review, the New York Times Magazine, and the Washington Post. She is a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, the winner of the 2014 Jackson Poetry Prize, and a contributing editor of Poets & Writers. She received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2016. Rankine is the Frederick Iseman Professor of Poetry at Yale University.