What Claudia Rankine learned from talking to white people Her latest play, ‘Help,’ asks white folks to grapple with their privilege

In 2019, poet and essayist Claudia Rankine wrote a controversial piece in The New York Times called, I Wanted To Know What White Men Thought About Their Privilege. So I Asked. That essay received over 2,000 comments, and Rankine’s inbox was flooded with emails. Now, the award-winning poet has turned her essay and the responses into a play called Help.

The original essay was inspired by conversations Rankine had with strangers in airports, where she’d ask them, point-blank, about their white privilege. Casual racism and discomfort ensued, and it spilled over into the comments section of that essay, where people said things like, “Barack Obama and Kamala Harris certainly benefited from being Black” and, “How come I’m always a stand-in for history?”

In Help, Rankine expands upon the conversations she began in her essay to navigate what she calls the “stuckness inside racial hierarchies.” 

“[White] people are the people around us,” Rankine told Andscape. “And if we’re not even willing to find out what they’re thinking, we are going to be surprised by their actions. And it would be fine if their actions were limited to them. But more often than not, the consequences of those actions are far-reaching.”

In Rankine’s estimation, those actions include recent laws that make it harder for marginalized groups to vote, that make it a crime to talk about gender and sexuality, and that are stripping away a woman’s right to choose. “You have actual legislation being put in place to undermine your ability to have any kind of agency around many aspects of your life,” Rankine said. Hence why the play is a cry and a call to action.

Help is currently running through April 10 at The Shed, the gleaming $475 million arts center in the Hudson Yards area of New York City. Rankine, a 2016 MacArthur “genius” Fellow, is best known for her poetry and essays, but she’s also dabbled in playwriting. She’s written a play about racism in academia called The White Card, and her poetry collection, Citizen: An American Lyric, has been adapted for theater.

Help has one Black character, the Narrator (played by April Matthis), who is surrounded by a gaggle of white people. She comments on them to the audience, but also interacts with them. The play incorporates some of Rankine’s conversations with strangers — like the one man who was disappointed that his son was not admitted into Yale, telling Rankine, “It’s tough when you can’t play the diversity card.”

Rankine doesn’t dismiss these offensive comments as microaggressions or the people who made them as deplorable. Instead, she views herself as something of an anthropologist looking for clues on how to overcome America’s racial chasm. She even released a book in 2020 titled Just Us: An American Conversation to explore how Black and white people can better talk to each other about white supremacy. When Rankine speaks, there’s no reproach in her voice, just a gentle inquisitiveness.

For instance, one thing that Rankine learned is that many white folks have a different definition of white privilege than she does. Which means that if the terms are not clearly defined, the conversation is doomed to fail.

“It was useful for me to learn that for many white people, the use of the phrase ‘white privilege’ just led them to economics,” Rankine said. “I’m not thinking about economics, I’m thinking about mobility, I’m thinking about your ability to leave your house, to send your children out without thinking the police is gonna kill them. I’m over here thinking about, ‘How are you able to live your life when I cannot?’ ”

She found herself having to persuade people to think of privilege beyond wealth, “to get people to understand that when I use this term, this is what I’m thinking. And I’m not saying you didn’t work hard for what you have. But I am asking you to look at the ways in which the structure has helped you.”

The most fruitful moments from such conversations haven’t been agreement or deciding who’s right. Instead, they were acknowledging disagreement in a way that was respectful, and not combative, “when we can at least even get to a point where we know what our differences are,” said Rankine.

Granted, these are one-on-one conversations. And who knows what ripples they may have. But Rankine said dialogue is even more necessary now.

“It might not feel like enough to some people. But to me, it’s a start,” she said. “We are so unfamiliar with having difficult conversations around racial differences and racism and the culture’s commitment to white supremacy. With the move to remove books from the classroom and condemn critical race theory, people are really saying, ‘I don’t want the discomfort of American history, in my children’s lives and my life, complicating my ability to leave yesterday behind and to move forward without changing anything.’ ”

Help ran for a few performances at The Shed in early 2020 before the coronavirus pandemic shut everything down. In the two years since, Rankine revised the play, incorporating more recent events, particularly the riot at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

Help makes clear that white supremacy is a danger not only to Black people, but to white people, and democracy. As the Jan. 6 insurrection demonstrated, white supremacy is willing to tear down American society to preserve itself. So Help isn’t just a meditation on the importance of conversation. It’s a call to action, because as Rankine wrote, “We’re in the emergency.” 

“We can’t afford to become exhausted at this moment,” Rankine said. “There is some need for us to allow ourselves to feel into the difficulty, to understand what is difficult, to have that feeling be legitimate for us so that we can address it — so that we don’t disassociate from the life that we’re in. I think it would be a great danger for all of us — if those of us, who have been engaged up until now, begin to disassociate from the struggle that is no doubt coming.”

So how does Rankine prevent herself from burning out and disassociating from our current reality?

“Sleep,” she said with a wry chuckle. “But also, I think for me, work is the great antidote. To be able to express what it is I see, helps me see.”