This year, the Whitney Biennial exhibition displayed a painting of Emmett Till, the 14-year-old black boy whose murder helped launch the Civil Rights Movement. The painting depicts Till’s open casket and evokes the horror of his murder. But in an open letter to the exhibition, Hanna Black, a black artist and writer, criticized the painting for being racially insensitive. Her problem: the painter, Dana Schutz, is white.
Black argues that it’s disrespectful for white people to use black people’s suffering as inspiration for their art because the subject of black suffering does not belong to them. Black raises valid concerns in her letter, and Schutz must be careful to be respectful of black people’s pain. But her race does not disqualify her from respectfully exploring black suffering in her art.
Maybe my perspective as a non-black person makes me unable to understand why this painting is inappropriate. But Black and the other protestors have not articulated a compelling reason to condemn Schutz’s work.
Black writes that it is disrespectful for white people to use black suffering as inspiration because white people have oppressed black people or allowed the oppression of black people to continue. This shows that they do not truly understand how black people have suffered. She writes, “the evidence of [white people’s] collective lack of understanding is that Black people go on dying at the hands of white supremacists, that Black communities go on living in desperate poverty not far from the museum where this valuable painting hangs.”
It is, of course, important for white people to not make light of black suffering. There is a particular risk for white artists like Schutz to be unintentionally disrespectful when exploring the experiences of black people in their art. But it is not inherently disrespectful for a white artist to draw inspiration from black suffering.
There is nothing disrespectful or disingenuous about Schutz’s painting. Her empathy for Till is genuine. She writes, “I don’t know what it is like to be black in America, but I do know what it is like to be a mother … The thought of anything happening to your child is beyond comprehension.” Moreover, Schutz has said the painting is not for sale, so she stands to make no financial gain. Her motives are artistic and empathetic.
The painting does not make a spectacle out of Till’s death, as protesters claim. There are several artistic endeavors by black artists underway that deal with Till’s death in ways that are no less dramatic than Schutz’s painting. Will Smith and Jay Z are producing an HBO series about Till, and a play about Till, written by his mother, is being adapted into a movie. These projects have attracted no protesters at all.
So what has Schutz done wrong? Like Smith, Jay-Z, and Till’s mother, Schutz’s work does not harm black people or disrespect their suffering. It expresses Schutz’s empathy for their pain. To say that white people should not create art about black suffering is to say that they shouldn’t have an emotional response to it. It is not wrong for white people to grieve Till’s death, and it is not wrong for them to express their grief through art. That’s the problem with Hanna Black’s message. She seems to say that white people should fight against the oppression of black people, but that they shouldn’t express their empathy for black suffering through art. Schutz’s art expresses this empathy, and her race does not make her art offensive.
Bhaskar Roberts is sophomore electrical engineering major from Buffalo, N.Y. He can be reached at bhaskarr@princeton.edu.
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