Claudia Rankine founder of the Racial Imaginary Institute and writer of the innovative Language-meets-lyric collections— Just Us, Citizen, and Don’t Let Me Be Lonely—as well many other essays, plays, and edited collections often uses visual media in her texts and performances. This Zoom recording from the Harvard Woodberry Poetry Room demonstrates Rankine making novel use of the platform’s multimedia capabilities for her performance through her use of shared video. This creative use of visual media will come as no surprise to Rankine’s readers. Citizen: An American Lyric pairs frank writing about the experience of racial microaggression with implicit connections and explicit examinations of visual sources from JMW Turner’s painting The Slave Ship to stills from television news and contemporary sculptures of realistic animal-human hybrids by Kate Clark commissioned for the book. Moreover, Rankine’s use of the visual media in her work extends to audiovisual collaborations, working with her partner, the filmmaker John Lucas, on a series of Situation Videos that pair Rankine’s voiceover poetry with politically-telling, experimental video; Situation 6 (Stop and Frisk) , for instance, superimposes red and blue police lights over a video of Black children going shopping for hoodies and sneakers, a haunting echo of the murder of Trayvon Martin and clear reference to bias and racial profiling in policing. In Just Us: An American Conversation , Rankine shifts her poetic vision to a necessary conversation about whiteness in America and white privilege. In this clip from the Harvard Woodberry Poetry Room’s T.S. Eliot Memorial Reading on April 22nd, 2022, recorded on Zoom, Rankine shares a video of a police training on bias from Indiana. Three stills from this video are used in Just Us , but these stills only show one side of the conversation: the angry white man responding to being called out for his “white privilege.” On screen in this video, we are able to see the conversation’s other side, a white woman police officer and a Black police chief conducting the training on bias. The video shown in full creates a powerful screen-within-the screen during Rankine’s performance, creating a conversation between multiple live and recorded videos. This reading occurred only days after the conviction of Derek Chauvin for the murder of George Floyd on April 20, 2021. Rankine’s allusion to Paul Celan’s quote, “what are these days when a conversation becomes almost a crime,” alludes to both the discussion of white privilege in the video shown and the woman later punished for it, but also the trial of Derek Chauvin for murdering George Floyd after what could have been a conversation about Floyd’s use of a counterfeit $20 bill became a homicide. By referencing Celan, a Romanian Jewish poet and holocaust survivor, Rankine implicitly constructs a historical connection between two historical moments, Europe during the Second World War and the present day US, during which verbal resistance to white supremacy even a conversation about it, is considered a crime by many. Later in this reading, Rankine uses share screen to share images from her erasure of Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia, retitled “Notes on the State of Whiteness,” which highlights the hypocrisy of enslavement through a poetic conversation with Jefferson’s text.