The White Card Read online

  The White Card

  ALSO BY CLAUDIA RANKINE

  Poetry

  Citizen: An American Lyric

  Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric

  Plot

  The End of the Alphabet

  Nothing in Nature Is Private

  Play

  The Provenance of Beauty: A South Bronx Travelogue

  Coeditor

  The Racial Imaginary

  American Poets in the 21st Century

  American Women Poets in the 21st Century

  The White Card

  A Play in One Act

  CLAUDIA RANKINE

  Graywolf Press

  Copyright © 2019 by Claudia Rankine

  This publication is made possible, in part, by the voters of Minnesota through a Minnesota State Arts Board Operating Support grant, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund, and a grant from the Wells Fargo Foundation. Significant support has also been provided by Target, the McKnight Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, the Amazon Literary Partnership, and other generous contributions from foundations, corporations, and individuals. To these organizations and individuals we offer our heartfelt thanks.

  Published by Graywolf Press

  250 Third Avenue North, Suite 600

  Minneapolis, Minnesota 55401

  All rights reserved.

  www.graywolfpress.org

  Published in the United States of America

  ISBN 978-1-55597-839-6

  Ebook ISBN 978-1-55597-886-0

  2 4 6 8 9 7 5 3 1

  First Graywolf Printing, 2019

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2018947087

  Cover design: John Lucas

  Cover art: Martha Tuttle

  The White Card opened on February 28, 2018, in collaboration with ArtsEmerson and the American Repertory Theater, at the Emerson Paramount Center on the Robert J. Orchard Stage in Boston, Massachusetts, with the following cast:

  CHARLOTTE CUMMINGS Karen Pittman

  CHARLES HAMILTON SPENCER Daniel Gerroll

  VIRGINIA COMPTON SPENCER Patricia Kalember

  ERIC SCHMIDT Jim Poulos

  ALEX COMPTON-SPENCER Colton Ryan

  Director: Diane Paulus

  Dramaturgy: P. Carl

  Scenic Design: Riccardo Hernandez

  Costume Design: Emilio Sosa

  Lighting Design: Stephen Strawbridge

  Sound Design: Will Pickens

  Projection Design: Peter Nigrini

  Associate Director: Carl Cofield

  Production Stage Manager: Sharika Niles

  Casting: Stephen Kopel, CSA

  PREFACE

  One evening during a question-and-answer session, a white, middle-aged man stood up. After movingly addressing my reading from Citizen, he asked me, “What can I do for you? How can I help you?” As I stood on stage regarding him, I wondered how to move his question away from me, my story, my body to the more relevant issues and dynamics regarding American history and white guilt. Teju Cole’s essay “The White-Savior Industrial Complex” came back to me in that moment. Maybe it would have been better to use Cole’s words directly, to quote his extension of Hannah Arendt into the realm of whiteness: “The banality of evil transmutes into the banality of sentimentality. The world is nothing but a problem to be solved by enthusiasm.” Or this: “The White Savior Industrial Complex is not about justice. It is about having a big emotional experience that validates privilege.”

  But in the moment, I decided to climb out from behind all my reading, references, and quotes and engage his question personally without the distancing scaffold of referential-speak. His question struck me as an age-old defensive shield against identifying with acts of racism at the hands of liberal, well-meaning white people, the kind he had just listened to me read. His question did the almost-imperceptible work of positioning him outside the problems Citizen interrogates, while maintaining his position of superiority relative to me in his act of offering to help me. He would help answer not only my problems but those of all black people, which he only at that moment recognized but otherwise was not implicated in or touched by. He seemed oblivious to the realization that our problems as a society are dependent on his presence, despite my project of saying this in all the ways I know how.

  The afterlife of white supremacy (to appropriate and flip on its head Saidiya Hartman’s “the afterlife of slavery”) is all our problem. Cole writes, “All he sees is need, and he sees no need to reason out the need for the need.” If he were to reason out the need for the need, he would understand he need not invite himself to the scene. He is already there. There was so much that could be said about the often-meaningless reparative largesse of whiteness in the face of human pain and suffering, but in the minutes we had for our exchange, I simply responded to the man, “I think the question you should be asking is what you can do for you.”

  He didn’t appreciate my answer.

  From inside his theater of noblesse oblige, which seems to come close to condescension but really exists in the depths of repression of American complicity with structural antiblack racism, rose an anger that I confess I didn’t expect. “If that is how you answer questions,” he responded, “then no one will ask you anything.”

  The germinal thought, the originating impulse, of The White Card came out of this man’s question and his response to my response. In his imagination, Where did I go wrong? Was I initially intended to express gratitude for his interest? Were his feelings and the feelings of the audience in general my first priority? Was recognition of his likability a necessary gateway into his ability to apprehend my work? I really wanted to have the conversation he started. I didn’t come all this way not to engage but as the affect theorist Lauren Berlant has stated, “What does it do to one’s attachment to life to have constantly to navigate atmospheres of white humorlessness.”

  It occurred to me after this incident that an audience member might read all the relevant books on racism, see all the documentaries and films, and know the “correct” phrases to mention, but in the moment of dialogue or confrontation retreat into a space of defensiveness, anger, silence, which is to say he might retreat into the comfort of control, which begins by putting me back in my imagined place. Perhaps any discussion of racism does not begin from a position of equality for those involved. Maybe the expectation is for the performance of something I as a black woman cannot see even as I object to its presence. Perhaps the only way to explore this known and yet invisible dynamic is to get in a room and act it out.

  Theater is by its very nature a space for and of encounter. The writing of The White Card was a way to test an imagined conversation regarding race and racism among strangers. The dinner party as a social setting for the sharing of both space and conversation in the home of a white family seemed the benevolent, natural, if not exactly neutral, site. The characters have come together to consider the terms of an exchange of art, while they get to know one another. What brings everyone to the room is a desire to be seen and known, but what keeps them there is the complexity of our human desire to be understood.

  This play could not have been written without the conversation and support of Catherine Barnett, Lauren Berlant, Allison Coudert, Diane Paulus, and P. Carl. Thank you to David Dower and David Howse for commissioning the work, Diane Borger and Ryan Michael Sweeney for developing the work, and to ArtsEmerson and American Repertory Theater for directing and producing The White Card.

  CLAUDIA RANKINE

  The White Card

  CHARACTERS

  CHARLOTTE CUMMINGS: female, black. Yale MFA graduate, fortyish. Her most recent collection of work uses photography. She has received major prizes and is on the verge of breaking into the i
nternational art market. Her mother is a lawyer for the ACLU and her father is an epidemiologist at Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital and a professor at Columbia University.

  ERIC SCHMIDT: male, white. Dealer, early forties. The great-grandson of Anton Franz Schmidt, who founded one of the most prestigious art galleries in New York. Eric is a connoisseur of modern conceptual art and a strong advocate of young progressive artists. He has been instrumental in shaping the Spencer Art Collection for the last decade and is on the board of the Spencer Art Foundation.

  CHARLES HAMILTON SPENCER: male, white. Entrepreneur, art collector, early sixties. Highly knowledgeable, well connected to political figures and businessmen, he is a lover of contemporary art who made his money in real estate. He is also a well-respected philanthropist who is interested in ideas around diversity.

  VIRGINIA COMPTON SPENCER: female, white. Charles’s wife, fifty-five to sixty. She is interested in art and in her late twenties was an art consultant for corporate clients. They have been married thirty years and have two sons.

  ALEX COMPTON-SPENCER: male, white. Twenty, a junior at Columbia University, and an activist. Deeply involved in current American politics, he is passionate as he sees the injustices in America. He sees his parents as part of the problem.

  Scene One

  Robert Rauschenberg, White Painting

  Robert Longo, Untitled (Ferguson Police, August 13, 2014)

  Glenn Ligon, Hands

  (monumental silkscreen of news photograph from the 1995 Million Man March)

  Jean-Michel Basquiat, The Death of Michael Stewart

  The sounds of a tennis match. The living/dining room is a tastefully elegant and spare NYC loft. In the room is contemporary work by artists representing the victimization of African Americans and Rauschenberg’s White Painting. They are well lit and prominent in the space. The art pieces are projected on canvasses around the white room. Everything in the room is white except for the art. The round dining table gestures toward dinner but need not have actual settings. Over the mantel is a piece of art covered by a cloth. At the back of the stage, doors lead onto a terrace. If possible the audience surrounds the dinner party to enable audience members to also be looking at each other.

  This is a lovely Saturday night in Tribeca, March 2017. The new administration has been in office for three months and the Spencers are awaiting their guest. From the balcony the city lights are in full view. Eric, Charles, and Virginia are watching the Australian Open a month after it aired.

  VIRGINIA: Serena is a beauty.

  ERIC: I prefer Venus.

  VIRGINIA: They’re both stunning.

  ERIC: You’re stunning.

  VIRGINIA: Well, I suppose all people are stunning—what’s your issue with Serena?

  ERIC: I don’t have to love everyone. In any case, she’s okay.

  CHARLES: Okay? Serena is anything but.

  VIRGINIA: Who would have thought the sisters would play each other again in a final this late in their careers. My favorite thing is watching Serena win.

  ERIC: Why are you watching if you know the outcome? What fun is that?

  VIRGINIA: I don’t watch her until after; I get too nervous. But I did want to see the Australian Open finals before the next Grand Slam came around. Can you tell she’s pregnant?

  CHARLES: (looking at TV) She’s pregnant? While she’s competing?

  ERIC: I read she got some hormonal rush from the pregnancy. People were complaining it was an unfair advantage.

  VIRGINIA: Now, that’s insane. I spent my first trimesters between the bathroom and the sofa. Why are men so challenged by the Williams sisters?

  ERIC: I don’t have a problem—

  CHARLES: (interrupting) She means men like that Russian tennis guy from a few years ago? That was the worst.

  VIRGINIA: He said they were scary to look at.

  CHARLES: I vaguely remember him calling the sisters “brothers” or something like that.

  VIRGINIA: It’s no different from what was said about the former first lady.

  CHARLES: That I distinctly remember.

  VIRGINIA: It’s hard to forget.

  ERIC: Remind me.

  VIRGINIA: An ape in high heels.

  ERIC: Some guy actually said that?

  VIRGINIA: A woman in government.

  ERIC: A woman? Wow. People. Jesus. Charles, I thought we might just check in before Charlotte arrives.

  CHARLES: What’s on your mind? (Charles hands Eric an hors d’oeuvre and a napkin.)

  ERIC: Where’s Lily?

  CHARLES: We’ve given Lily the night off. Virginia thought the evening would be more informal that way.

  ERIC: Ah, I understand.

  VIRGINIA: Anything we should know?

  ERIC: No, no, no. She’s lovely. Charlotte’s one of us. I just wanted to touch base regarding a few things.

  CHARLES: Yes, of course.

  ERIC: Remember, she hasn’t committed to giving us the new series and she’s not doing individual pieces.

  VIRGINIA: That must take other collectors out of the running.

  ERIC: Almost everyone, all the way out. She knows that to be collected by you will send her prices up here in New York but also in London, Zurich, and L.A. In the past, she has refused some collectors on principle, but I know that won’t be a problem here.

  VIRGINIA: What do you mean refuse?

  ERIC: Some artists can’t separate themselves from their work. I think she’s one of those. She doesn’t have children; the work is everything to her—so she won’t sell it to just anybody. She needs the collector to be invested in the spirit of the work. She needs money, yeah, but it can be tricky with her.

  CHARLES: That makes sense to me. I imagine we’ll be her perfect collaborators.

  VIRGINIA: Does she know Charles is interested in the pieces we saw in Miami?

  CHARLES: Eric says those are committed. Will she bring a sample of the new work?

  ERIC: I billed this as just a dinner. I hope that’s okay. She’s not showing the new work to anyone at this point, but from what she’s told me, it sounds very compelling.

  CHARLES: But still with an emphasis on racial injustice?

  ERIC: Still elegiac.

  (Doorbell rings.)

  VIRGINIA: That must be her now.

  (No one moves.)

  ERIC: Is someone going to let her in?

  VIRGINIA: Oh right. Charles?

  ERIC: I’ll let her in. (He goes to get the door.)

  CHARLES: And where is Alex?

  VIRGINIA: I told him to be here by seven.

  CHARLES: As if he does anything we tell him.

  VIRGINIA: Go easy tonight.

  (Eric reenters with Charlotte.)

  ERIC: Virginia, Charles—It’s my pleasure to present the artist of the twenty-first century.

  CHARLES: My dear Ms. Cummings. So good of you to come.

  CHARLOTTE: Please call me Charlotte.

  CHARLES: Your picture doesn’t do you justice. We saw your impressive work at Art Basel and the Armory. And of course the photo-collages from Ferguson are unforgettable.

  VIRGINIA: I’m Virginia. Welcome.

  CHARLOTTE: Thank you.

  VIRGINIA: Your coat? Charles, do take Charlotte’s coat. Eric says we haven’t met, but I know we’ve been introduced. We met at Jack Shainman Gallery.

  CHARLOTTE: I don’t …

  ERIC: Jack Shainman? I introduced you to … that wasn’t Charlotte.

  VIRGINIA: Yes it was.

  CHARLES: I assume it’s champagne all around.

  CHARLOTTE: Thank you. You have a beautiful home. Wow, you have one of Rauschenberg’s White Paintings. The light on it makes everything really … bright.

  CHARLES: Despite the fact they are monochromatic it’s amazing how much it changes with the light. It was curated to brighten the room.

  VIRGINIA: Actually, it’s just a piece I wanted. Charles curated the rest. It’s a lot of history to see every day. Luckily most of them are at th
e foundation.

  ERIC: These here are some of the works that are most meaningful to Charles.

  CHARLES: Not all the artists are African American, but all the work considers the violence against them.

  ERIC: Charlotte’s work is what’s missing from our collection.

  VIRGINIA: Charles likes to wear his commitment on the walls. I personally can think of other places for him to put it, but we agree to disagree. Don’t we, sweetheart?

  CHARLES: I guess we do. Charlotte, do you know Robert Longo’s work? This one is untitled but it’s of Ferguson police, August 13, 2014. His work critiques fascism.

  CHARLOTTE: Hmmm, I’m not sure I understand how fascism’s being critiqued.

  CHARLES: All that white, smoky charcoal obscuring the faceless police? I—

  VIRGINIA: (interrupting) I like it. It’s atmospheric and not as graphic.

  CHARLOTTE: That’s my point.

  ERIC: If I remember correctly the painting is based on an actual photograph.

  CHARLES: You know it is.

  VIRGINIA: Eric likes to pretend he doesn’t know all he knows. Isn’t that right, Eric?

  CHARLOTTE: (playful) He’s the epitome of humility.

  CHARLES: He knows good work when he sees it. And so do I.

  ERIC: Charlotte, I think that’s meant for you.

  VIRGINIA: Yes, Charlotte, all eyes are on you.

  CHARLOTTE: My friends say such good things about working with you. Glenn Ligon was so pleased we were finally connecting.

  CHARLES: Glenn, yes. We have a number of his pieces, but this one here is from the Million Man March. It’s an early piece focusing on the social and economic stresses that black men face.

  VIRGINIA: Come, let me show you this other piece. It’s called Defacement: The Death of Michael … Michael Stewart, that’s right. He was a Pratt student, graffiti artist, who was beaten into a coma by police. He died. This is about as real as I can handle it.