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. Citizen : You are in the dark, in the car. 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. Rankine responded that all of her books begin with the title Danger: Will Robinson. When Rankine joined, he asked her about why the book got its bold title. 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. California Book Club host John Freeman started off an hour-long discussion of Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric by noting the beautiful and disturbing images in the book. The White Card stages a conversation that is both informed and derailed by the black/white American drama.
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