I was enchanted by Claudia Rankine’s smile.

Even though this was our second interview together (the first was by phone), and we have several friends in common, I was still surprised by her welcoming hug and warmth when we met at a conference room in the Shed three weeks before the world premiere of her play “Help” there on March 10. Forty minutes later, I realized that after years of teaching her poetry, especially “Citizen,” her book-length poem on American race relations, my mind somehow had constructed Rankine as reserved, scolding and confrontational.

I left our conversation even more out of sorts as I asked myself: “If I, as a black woman, could so easily misread Claudia Rankine, what hope is there for any white man not to do the same?”

This dilemma — between the racial and gender stereotypes that our society projects onto black women and how they have to reject those roles in order to assert their own identities — is the central conflict of “Help.” Commissioned by the Shed, New York City’s new $475 million arts center that is now in its second season at Hudson Yards, the play is partly based on Rankine’s New York Times Magazine article from last July, “I Wanted to Know What White Men Thought About Their Privilege. So I Asked.”