Morgan Jerkins Speaks With Claudia Rankine About Becoming a Playwright

With her new play, The White Card, Claudia Rankine continues to explore the ways that the color of our skin impacts our daily lives. At Vulture, Morgan Jerkins speaks with Rankine about the play, her previous book (Citizen: An American Lyric), Serena Williams, reparations, and more. Vulture introduces Jerkins and Rankine's discussion, explaining that "Claudia Rankine is one of today’s foremost writers on racism and the white imagination. Citizen: An American Lyric, a hybrid of poetry and essay, catapulted her to national prominence in 2014 (and became a bestseller)." Picking up from there: 

Two years later, a MacArthur “genius” grant cited her for “crafting critical texts that are proving to be essential for understanding American life while also enriching the craft of poetry with a new sense of agency and urgency.” With the $625,000 prize money, she created The Racial Imaginary Institute, a cultural laboratory hosting symposiums, lectures, and writings that explore how race — arbitrary as it may be — has such an immense impact on all of our lives.

And now, Rankine is a playwright, too. Published last month, The White Card: A Play echoes many of Citizen’s themes, subtly dramatizing the full spectrum of racism from micro-aggression to surveillance to death as spectacle. Charlotte, a black female artist and a star on the rise, is invited over to dinner one night by the white and wealthy collectors Charles and Virginia, who hope to buy some of her work. When the couple’s son Alex attacks the group for their timid politics, the conversation turns explosive. Rankine deftly crafts a story in which whiteness and blackness interact under the guise of good intentions, until power relations inevitably take center stage. Commissioned by ArtsEmerson and the American Repertory Theater, the play premiered a year ago in Boston, and will make its New York premier in June at the New York Public Library. Morgan Jerkins spoke recently with Rankine about white guilt, bad reviews, Mo’Nique, and the dilemmas of the black artist.

In your preface to the play, you mention a white man asking you during a talk, “What can I do for you?” in order to mend race relations. You flipped the question back on him: “You should ask what can you do for yourself.” He didn’t like that. Where do you think his offer of benevolence fell short?
The idea of white benevolence is based on their desire to share their good fortune, as in actual fortune. If you’re not understanding how you came to that fortune, you really feel like you’re doing other people a favor. I wanted to show that it comes from the place of wanting to help without admitting how you also contributed to the crippling of black Americans in this country.

What about reparations, which are being taken more seriously as a campaign issue? Is that an act of benevolence or something different — justice? 
It’s an act of justice. And one form of reparations can take is putting into place that which was willfully neglected—voting rights, good schools, clean water, etc.

Read more at Vulture.