Help: A New Play by Claudia Rankine

In July of 2019 the New York Times published an essay I wrote entitled in the print version, “Brief Conversations with White Men,” and online, “I Wanted to Know What White Men Thought About Their Privilege. So I Asked.” The piece received 2,197 comments. I also received over 200 email correspondences from people I didn’t know. Surprisingly, I was suddenly in conversation with hundreds of white men and a number of Black women.Though I wasn’t able to respond to each person individually, Help became a way to use theater to continue the conversation.

Help is a play in which the Narrator inhabits the category of the Black woman in order to be in dialogue with the structure of white supremacy. As the playwright, I was interested in exploring with various publics our power structure, comprised primarily of white men who ultimately determine all civic possibility. According to the US Census Bureau, for example, white men comprise approximately 31 percent of the US population. Yet, since the Supreme Court’s inception in 1789, 94 percent of justices have been white men. In today’s 117th US Congress (the most diverse in our history), 60 percent of its members are white men. According to Fortune magazine, 7 in 10 senior executives are white men, who also account for 72 percent of corporate leadership at the 16 Fortune 500 companies that share demographic information.

The text spoken by white people in the piece was primarily culled from responses to the Times article; public statements by men and women in the government and public life; and interviews conducted with white men by civil rights activist and theologian Ruby Sales, or documentary filmmaker Whitney Dow, or myself. Where the dialogue was excerpted from interviews, no autobiographical details were included. This is a play holding loosely the categories of white man, white woman, and Black woman. The various white men and women do not hold any single identity throughout the play, but speak with the many voices and positions expressed in response to the original article and recent events (including the January 6 insurrection and the global pandemic).

Help builds on the desire to create a shared reality. One in which there is agreement not in how to respond but in what we see is happening. If it’s raining, can we all agree it is raining? How we respond to the rain varies, but can we agree the rain is coming down? Can we live in relation to each other within a shared knowing? The genius analysis, language, and work of Fred Moten, Saidiya Hartman, Lauren Berlant, Frank Wilderson III, Jared Sexton, and Christina Sharpe is foundational to Help. As Ruby Sales has said, “I want a theology that begins to deepen people’s understanding about their capacity to live fully human lives and to touch the goodness inside of them, rather than call upon them—the part of themselves that’s not relational. Because there’s nothing wrong with being European American; that’s not the problem. It’s how you actualize that history and how you actualize that reality.”