The White Card

Ms. Rankine has given us a challenging, timely, and necessary work that deserves both our undivided attention and praise.

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By the end of the play, there is a sense that the characters have been altered by their raw, highly-charged encounters with each other. It doesn’t feel like a resolution, but a greater understanding has been achieved, leaving us with the hope that dialogue may continue.

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The playwright wants us to squirm, but simultaneously implores us to stay in the room to wrestle with these issues – as individuals and as members of communities that are willing to engage in tough conversations.

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It is accepted wisdom that “Seeing is believing,” and seeing is precisely what The White Card requires: seeing what is assumed and unexamined, namely the white card which gives those who have it a hidden pass, and those who don’t, provocation. The White Card got under my skin. It stages a very difficult conversation about racism and the unconscious white bias which perpetuates it, and culminates in a jolting moment of recognition which reveals the lens through which white culture looks– and does not see.

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It’s an intense and achingly relevant play…Rankine observes the details of white complacency with piercing vision. No white audience member can depart the experience able to say he or she has never been challenged to confront the meaning of white privilege, and in that sense the play is clearly successful.

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Claudia Rankine’s new play explores understanding, identity, and belonging.

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As an inquiry into structural racism and an interrogation of whiteness — or, as the play’s sole black character puts it, “the ordinary complicity of white people’’ — The White Card is a bracing experience that leaves you with plenty to think about.

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The play draws no conclusions. It is more about how conversations around race get derailed, and start over, and what misconceptions occur along the way in those conversations. It’s an exploration.

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Poet and essayist Claudia Rankine has been examining, in a series of acclaimed books, how racial assumptions shape daily life. She also has extended her investigations beyond books to such public channels as readings and talks — and now, a play.

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“I am hoping the play will allow us to start talking,” Rankine says. “What the talk will do . . .” She pauses. “Who knows? Until we start talking about what we believe and why we believe it, we will continue to tiptoe around each other and get nowhere. We have seen what the silence does. We should give talking a chance.”

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