Seven titles that explore whiteness in intimate relationships

Lisa Low is the author of Crown for the Girl Inside, winner of the Vinyl 45 Chapbook Contest from YesYes Books. She is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize and a Gulf Coast Nonfiction Prize, and her poems have appeared in Copper Nickel, Ecotone, The Massachusetts Review, Poetry, The Southern Review, and elsewhere. She lives in Chicago.

Low's full-length poetry collection is Replica.

At Electric Lit she tagged seven "cross-genre books explore interracial relationships by inverting the white gaze." One title on the list:

Just Us: An American Conversation by Claudia Rankine

Rankine challenges herself to ask white men what they think of their privilege early on in Just Us, a hybrid text containing essays, poems, images, and research, in the lineage of her 2014 collection Citizen. Several airport/airplane interactions later, Rankine recounts her findings to her white husband, who “believes he understands and recognizes his own privilege. Certainly he knows the right terminology to use, even when these agreed-upon terms prevent us from stumbling into moments of real recognition.” This white husband is a minor character in a book that advocates for messiness, that probes the intimacy of conversations on whiteness with strangers and friends alike. But “lemonade,” a small section on their relationship and a session with a marriage counselor, deepens previous and subsequent conversations in the book and adds meaning to the title “just us.”

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue