• American Studies
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• v.44 no.2
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• pp.97-129
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• 2021

In The White Card (2019), Claudia Rankine dramatically interrogates whiteness's persistent, reflexive habit of trying to preserve a state of innocence, expressing her vision of how this tendency blinds white liberal subjectivity to the structural reality of institutionalized racism in America. Rankine's exposure of the invisibility to which people of color are usually consigned by American whiteness is inseparable from her critical interrogation of how the hypervisibility of victims of racial violence provides white liberal subjectivity opportunities to intervene and feel good about itself. What Rankine enacts in the play is a process of repetition and revision, signifyin(g) on racial violence and its history; acts of racial violence continue to accrete, and her act of signifyin(g) on the countless acts of racial violence in America conveys the understanding that this text cannot be rewritten if white America continues to attend solely to individual, ostensibly isolated, acts of racial injustice.