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THE UPSIDE DOWNWHY THE POETRY OF CLAUDIA RANKINE IS ESSENTIAL READING FOR RIGHT NOW JOHN MITCHINSON CONSIDERS HOW THE AUTHOR COMBINES THE INTEGRITY OF AN INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALIST WITH A

RHETORICAL URGENCY IN A TIMELY EXPLORATION OF WHITENESS When I originally conceived of this column (with a grateful hat-tip to the first series of _Stranger Things_), I wanted to find a way

of de-familiarising the world to better show up its underlying patterns. Sometimes this was achieved by assuming the point of view of a wasp or an octopus, but mostly it involved fossicking

in the overlooked gaps in our history and culture. Now we are all living in a kind of upside-down, I find myself looking for something simpler but more elusive: how to engage with the

strangeness of this time without giving into despair or exhaustion on the one hand, or short-term social media-enabled rage on the other. As so often for me, cometh the hour, cometh the

writer. I’d been aware of the work of American poet and academic Claudia Rankine since 2014, when her collection _Citizen: An American Lyric _won several awards and became a _New York Times_

bestseller – a rarity for a book of poetry. Then earlier this year, _Just Us: An American Conversation_ was published as the global Black Lives Matters protests were at their height. It

seemed a propitious moment to explore Rankine’s work. Rarely has a hunch been so richly rewarded. _Citizen_ detonates the safe and familiar form of lyric poetry by mixing verse with prose

meditation, visual art, photographs and film scripts. It is a book that asks to us respond on many different levels – the other media don’t ‘illustrate’ the writing; they add emotional

context and resonance. The clue is in the subtitle: the book is an investigation into the lyric impulse – “the pronoun holding the person together” – from the position of a black woman whose

presence is continually minimised, eroded and erased. We are buttonholed by a ‘you’ (rather than an ‘I’) from the first page, as Rankine gathers a shocking litany of racist

micro-aggressions: in banks, shops, on aeroplanes, at mostly white dinner parties, at academic conferences. Longer sequences unpack the race-baiting of Serena Williams and Zinedine Zidane

and the woeful federal response to Hurricane Katrina. Rankine summons the ‘upside down’ reality of being a black woman in contemporary America with the patience and curiosity of a scientific

enquiry. And, as well as interrogating the reactions and motivations of the white people she interacts with, she also carefully unpacks her own reactions, subjecting her anger and

disappointment to the same sceptical assessments. BRUTALITY OF EMPIREWAS A SCANDAL IN ITS OWN TIME Given the events of the past four years, it is perhaps understandable that _Just Us,_ is a

longer, darker book. There is very little in it that resembles most people’s idea of poetry. Instead, Rankine delivers a sustained enquiry into white privilege (a phrase she dislikes as it

comes with connotations of economic advantage: she prefers ‘white living’ – the ability to live unmolested because of the colour of your skin). Whiteness, she argues, has become invisible

through its identification with “normalcy and universality” which masks its “omnipresent institutional power”. She adds: “I needed to slowly unpack and understand how whiteness was created”.

This requires deep dives into educational disparity, policing, the relationship between race and class, the tensions between black, Latinx and other communities of colour, the challenges of

diversity training, the rise of right-wing terrorism, and the strange and complex impulse for women of all races to dye their hair blond. But this is no sociological treatise: her

organising principle is the conversation. She talks to white friends and strangers she meets while travelling and asks them about how they perceive and understand their own whiteness. She

then shares the written-up notes of these dialogues and the written responses they elicit are revealing, shocking and sometimes unexpectedly moving. Throughout, these investigations are

mirrored on the opposite page by extensive footnotes, graphs, photographs and sources that function as a commentary and fact-check on the main text. The effect is exhilarating. Rankine has

created an unclassifiable new form combining the patience and integrity of an investigative journalist with the rhetorical urgency of a James Baldwin or Ta-Nehisi Coates. But what really

sets her work apart is the inclusion or her own complex and ambiguous responses – the work of a poet not a polemicist. It is full of what she calls “real thought”, an attempt to formulate

“the event of feeling historical in the present”. Challenged by a colleague that this hardly represents a strategy, she responds, as a poet should, that “response is my strategy”. And then

she expands, holding out a poet’s hope for the future: “What I know is that an inchoate desire for a future other than the one that seems to be forming our days brings me to a seat around

any table to lean forward, to hear, to respond, to await response from any other. Tell me something, one thing, the thing, tell me that thing.” _John Mitchinson is a writer and publisher and

co-founder of Unbound, the world’s leading crowdfunding platform for books. He was one of the founders of BBC’s QI_ -------------------------