Exploring Claudia Rankine’s Help: A Quest for Honest Conversations About Privilege

In July 2019, Claudia Rankine, an acclaimed playwright, essayist, and poet, published a compelling piece in the New York Times titled “I Wanted to Know What White Men Thought About Their Privilege. So I asked.” This essay, alongside Rankine’s later work, her book Just Us, and the play Help, delves into the complexities of engaging white men in conversations about privilege and race. By setting many of these discussions in the liminal space of the airport—where travelers are removed from their usual environments—Rankine creates a metaphor for the potential for change and reflection while examining the obstacles these conversations face.

The Context of Rankine’s Inquiry

Rankine’s essay emerged in a politically charged time. Donald Trump was still in office, embroiled in controversies such as the conversation with Volodymyr Zelensky that led to his first impeachment. In addition to political turmoil, the U.S. was experiencing an unprecedented climate crisis and racial inequality—police killed over 100 people that July, with Black people three times more likely to be victims than white people. Amid this landscape, Rankine turned her focus to white men, often the beneficiaries of privilege, to understand how they perceive their racial advantages.

The Airport as a Space for Conversation

Rankine chose the airport for these interactions because it represented a transient, in-between space where people are temporarily removed from their routines. “I found myself considering these white men who passed hours with me in airport lounges, at gates, on planes,” she writes. In these liminal spaces, she began her inquiry into how white men thought about their privilege, asking questions often avoided in more familiar settings.

The Struggle for an Honest Dialogue

In Us and her play Help, Rankine portrays these conversations as fraught with defensiveness, evasion, and discomfort. When Rankine asks a white man about his privilege after he mentions his son’s rejection from Yale, he stumbles and offers a deflection: “The Asians are flooding the Ivy Leagues,” he says, in an attempt to distance the conversation from Black affirmative action.

Rankine’s frustration is evident as she reflects on these interactions. She seeks to create a “new narrative” that includes the whiteness of those she engages with, a narrative where both she and the white men she encounters can acknowledge their racial identities openly. However, these conversations often fall short of her expectations.

Translating the Essay to the Stage

Rankine’s essay evolved into her play Help, directed by Taibi Magar. On stage, the Narrator, played by April Matthis, serves as a stand-in for Rankine, while the rest of the cast comprises primarily white men. This visual metaphor, with Matthis as the sole Black figure in a sea of whiteness, highlights the isolation and challenge of attempting to have honest conversations about race and privilege.

The play functions as an iterative form, cycling through scenes that mimic the repeated attempts at engagement Rankine faced in her real-life interactions. The white actors shift roles and voices, creating a kind of Greek chorus, echoing the responses Rankine received in airports—civility, deflection, and discomfort.

The Body and Expectations

Rankine’s exploration of these dynamics extends beyond words and into the realm of the body. In Help, Matthis’s presence on stage as the only Black actor draws attention to the physicality of race, echoing Rankine’s earlier work, The Provenance of Beauty. Rankine is deeply interested in how race and privilege are embodied and how the body becomes both the site of vulnerability and expectation.

In her essay “Social Contract” from Just Us, Rankine reflects on the personal nature of these conversations. She recounts an experience at a dinner party where a white woman silences her by shifting the conversation away from racism to dessert. “Whiteness wants the kind of progress that reflects what it values, a reflection of itself,” Rankine writes. This recurring theme—of white avoidance and discomfort—underscores the personal toll of engaging in these dialogues.

The Unfinished Business of Race Conversations

The fact that Rankine revisits these ideas across multiple forms—essay, book, play—suggests that understanding and addressing white privilege remains incomplete. Rankine argues that the “honest conversation” about race often touted as a solution in the 1980s and 1990s was a deflection rather than an actual engagement. Yet, in the current political and social climate, there is renewed pressure on white individuals to have these conversations, not in a hypothetical future but in their everyday lives.

However, as Rankine’s work illustrates, these conversations often fail to live up to their promise. The discomfort, defensiveness, and evasiveness that white individuals display—especially when confronted directly by a person of color—reveal the deep-seated fears and anxieties that still surround race in America.

Conclusion: Searching for Accountability

In Help, Rankine’s Narrator is searching for a white person who can honestly confront their privilege, who can sit in their whiteness the way people of color are forced to sit in theirs. Whether or not she finds accountability remains an open question; Rankine asks the audience—and the reader—to reflect on their position in the racial landscape through her work. Why is it so hard for white people to be honest about privilege? What are they so afraid of?

Rankine leaves these questions unanswered, but her relentless pursuit of them in her writing and performance work suggests that the conversation is far from over.