Facebook Publication Date: 8/23/2019 16:08
https://s3.amazonaws.com/american-rep-assets/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/17110521/The-White-Card-Toolkit.pdf
From the desk of Claire Ramsey:
Last week I bought two of Claudia Rankine’s books, her play, The White Card, and her long poem, Citizen: An American Lyric. Yesterday I read The White Card – it’s a one act play. I cannot recommend it highly enough.
We at Lace on Race already know Rankine, from her On Being interview. So her thoughts and her approach to social justice and life for Black people in the US are familiar. Still there is nothing like reading her writing, especially once you have heard her tell about meeting the guy on the plane who told her he didn’t see color. So, find The White Card (at a Black-owned bookstore like Mahogany Books mahoganybooks.com) or at your local library. (I live in Seattle and w/my public library account I can borrow e-books, and stay in my pajamas all day). I have not been able to find an online source for the play, and that is probably a good thing b/c Rankine is a writer and people should not be able to get her work by just taking it. She is worth the price of a paperback, believe me.
The play is about a rich white couple and their son(s), a white art dealer, and a black woman artist. The couple invited her (and the dealer and one of their sons) to dinner, and pridefully show off their stuff, and try to persuade Charlotte, the artist, not only that they are not racist, but that they are highly evolved very aware white people. These are things that we can imagine, more or less. Dinner table, white people’s delusions, family tensions, wheeling and dealing over art and artists. Art, though, is the main topic, particularly art that represents the violence done to black Americans. It’s challenging to “imagine” this art – paintings, sculpture, photos – if you haven’t seen it and don’t know anything about the artists.
The White Card Toolkit, written to accompany the play, includes a good illustrated essay about the art that the characters in the play talk about – very useful. Also included are a synopsis of the play, excerpts from Citizen (the long poem), and a thought provoking essay about whiteness and how white teachers might approach that topic with white students. If you are interested in theater and stage design, you might like the article about the staging of The White Card at Arts Emerson, a theater associated with Emerson College in Boston MA.
Best of all there is an interview with Claudia Rankine, titled Staying in the Room. I didn’t know the word “dramaturg” and had to look it up, since I know nothing about theater. It’s a literary advisor on a play. No matter, the interview is great because it is her, and it’s another chance to hear her voice her thoughts about racism and the mess we are in.
As she does in other places, she talks about white privilege as “internalized dominance,” a term that I think is easier to understand than any phrase that has the word “privilege” embedded in it. Most speakers of American English cling to “privilege” in its meaning of something special, a right or advantage, that is often reduced to “rich and snooty consumers,” so find it easy to deny that they are privileged. But, that dominance is real, and genuinely internalized, and “Everything in the culture has worked over time—overtime—to allow white people to feel that dominance. And no individual in these United States could have avoided it. No matter what their intentions are. There is no stepping outside the culture.” This is such a clear way of expressing it – we can’t just step out of our culture, particularly the parts that are so internal to our view of the world that we simply do not recognize it.
Rankine also raises “white distress.” In 2017, when the interview was published, new research had revealed that white mortality had changed in a startling way – more white people between the ages of 26 – 64 were dying. One possible explanation is the “diseases of despair” – mainly suicide and opioid addictions. Black and Latino populations did not show this change. Why? She suggests that our internalized dominance as white people made us a promise – that our dominance would last our entire lives, and our aspirations to wealth, power, good jobs, good futures for our children, were guaranteed, as if they were rights. “And suddenly, due to many things—outsourcing, you know, technology, many things—they don’t have jobs, they don’t have health insurance, they don’t have a lot of things. And other people, like black people, let’s say, who don’t have those things, are like, “Oh, we never had those things.” She comments that white people will find someone to blame – black people, immigrants – for taking away our right to all that dominance was supposed to give us. “But there’s also true despair. And it has to do with the sense that “these things were my right as a white person. You told me I was white, so therefore, all these resources were mine. All of this mobility was mine. And now I don’t have that. So, I’m going to take myself out, and I might take some of you all out with me.” ”
The guy who is interviewing her (the dramaturg) comments that during the time he and Ms Rankine have been developing the play, they have been to many dinner parties together, where white people “try to prove themselves not racist to you.” He asks if it is even possible for a white person and a black person to have a conversation about race. She replies: “Well, that is the question. That is what we have been working on with the play: how do you stage the conversation that has stalled so many times before?”
I’m not giving anything away if I say that the conversation stalls on stage too. And the white couple, Charles and Virginia, tread on the white pathways we are familiar with as they display their art, and their deluded ideas about it.
Read The White Card. Then read The White Card Toolkit, and it will boost your grasp of the play. Then, like me, read The White Card again.
There will a lot we can talk about with Lace and the Lace on Race community.
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