Rankine’s The White Card is a moving and revelatory distillation of racial divisions as experienced in the white spaces of the living room, the art gallery, the theater, and the imagination itself. One year later, the second scene brings Charlotte and Charles into the artist’s studio, and their confrontation raises both the stakes and the questions of what-and who-is actually on display.

Their conversation about art and representations of race spirals toward the devastation of Virginia and Charles’s intentions. The scenes in this one-act play, for all the characters’ disagreements, stalemates, and seeming impasses, explore what happens if one is willing to stay in the room when it is painful to bear the pressure to listen and the obligation to respond.Ĭlaudia Rankine’s first published play, The White Card, poses the essential question: Can American society progress if whiteness remains invisible?Ĭomposed of two scenes, the play opens with a dinner party thrown by Virginia and Charles, an influential Manhattan couple, for the up-and-coming artist Charlotte. Rankine describes an incident in which a white friend refers to the subject by the wrong name: “Haven’t you said this to a close friend who early in your friendship, when distracted would call you by the name of her black housekeeper? You assumed you two were the only black people in her life” (7).The White Card stages a conversation that is both informed and derailed by the black/white American drama. The subject takes an inventory of their physical sensations after experiencing a racist encounter.

Moving away from the memory of the two girls, Rankine describes a more embodied feeling: “Certain moments send adrenaline to the heart, dry out the tongue, and clog the lungs” (7).

The subject recalls these two little girls, thinking with muted sadness about how the little white girl cheated without punishment. The white girl cheats from the black girl’s schoolwork. The subject is then a young black girl at Catholic school who has an encounter with a white girl. Philip and James School on White Plains Road and the girl sitting in the seat behind you asks you to lean to the right during exams so she can copy what you have written” (5). Following the speaker’s heady ruminations about identity, cultural positioning, and history, a simple interaction takes place at a drugstore.

Rankine describes the subject’s experience in Catholic school when they were twelve years old: “You are twelve attending Sts. As abstract and philosophical as Citizen can get, it also frequently grounds readers by focusing on a small, everyday scene.

Citizen by claudia rankine sparknotes