Just Us: An American Conversation

Three book chapters bear the title “liminal spaces.” A liminal space is a transitional location. Rankine’s first chapter focuses on one of the most common liminal spaces—an airport. In these spaces, she asks various white men what they think about white male privilege. Her second chapter focuses on public spaces—Starbucks and parks—where various white citizens call the police on Black people whom they do not wish to have present. Rankine transcribes calls between these white people and 911 operators. Thus, there is a second transition between these people who are invisible to each other over the phone, though the presumptuous entitlement of these white 911 callers may give away their racial identity without their announcing it. In Rankine’s third and final chapter with this title she imagines a liminal space in which whites and people of color may meet (Rankine is uncertain) to form a new idea, a new republic.

Liminality is the state of being at a threshold or in a transitional state. This includes the transition between life and death. Thus, there is a subtle reminder that the inability to relinquish white supremacy will result in the literal deaths of more people of color. The possibility of transitioning into a new space, one in which there is acknowledgement of another’s pain, awaits at the other end of this threshold.

The Naturalization Act of 1790 was the first law passed by the U.S. Congress to establish the rules of granting citizenship by naturalization. The law “restricted citizenship to ‘any alien, being a free white person’” (18). It effectively limited citizenship to those who immigrated to the United States from Western Europe.

Rankine connects this legislation to the creation of white identity in the United States. She argues that the act is connected to contemporary legislation that determines how to treat and naturalize “both documented and undocumented Mexicans” (18). The act is also connected to Trump’s assertion that Mexico does not send the US its best people. Without stating it directly, Rankine asserts that the law has racialized citizenship and established the notion that only Western Europeans are most deserving and most desirable for American citizenship. The ideology of the Naturalization Act would also impact efforts to naturalize Irish, Italian, and Asian peoples in later centuries. In later chapters, Rankine will describe how the former two groups were able to assimilate into a collective white identity through intermarriage, and as a result of the country shifting toward a collective white identity instead of a white identity that made hierarchical ethnic distinctions. Asians, like other non-white peoples, would be excluded from this because they are not of European descent. Thus, the Naturalization Act established the idea that the only “true” Americans were those of ethnic European heritage.

Named after the white woman who was the first test-strip card model, a Shirley card is a reference card that shows a white woman “wearing a colorful, high-contrast dress” (52). The card is the standard for measuring skin tones on a photograph before it goes to print. The light skin tones of Shirley and subsequent models led to the creation of ideal skin tone standard in North America. These standards were created in the early 20th century, but they remain the dominant standard.

Rankine uses the existence of Shirley cards to explain the less visible biases that are built into facets of American life. Color photography and film have favored the complexions of lighter-skinned people. Film scholar Richard Dyer, whom Rankine mentions as a writer she includes in her course on whiteness, has also written about this in a book entitled White: Essays on Race and Culture.

Rankine mentions “stand your ground” laws in the context of describing white Americans’ “assumptions of privilege and exclusion” (26). Thus, Rankine asserts, these laws allow white people to kill Black people, even when the latter are unarmed, if they say that they were motivated by fear.

Currently, 38 states have “stand your ground laws,” while 30 have the provision that there is no requirement to retreat from an attacker when a supposed defender is in a space in which they are lawfully present. “Stand your ground” laws became a topic of public conversation in 2012 during George Zimmerman’s trial for killing 17-year-old Trayvon Martin. Zimmerman was a local vigilante and neighborhood watchman in Sanford, Florida, who stalked and confronted Martin. This led to a physical altercation that became deadly when Zimmerman shot Martin out of supposed fear of his life. Zimmerman was found “not guilty” for committing murder in the first-degree.