Comparative Drama

"Until we are willing to look at the ways in which white Americans are culpable in the suffering of the people of color, and understand that culpability needs to be present in the representation of that, suffering will continue."

Claudia Rankine¹

"Art has always been the tool of the powerful, and also the weapon of the dispossessed: official imagery controls narratives of identity and defines what is 'right', but these representations can be creatively subverted and destroyed. You have to know the rules of the space to sabotage it."

Alice Procter²

Protest arose at the Whitney Museum's 2017 Biennial exhibit in response to Dana Schutz's painting Open Casket, a somewhat abstract rendering of the famous photograph of Emmett Till in his casket. Artist Parker Bright's critique led him to stand in front of the painting wearing a tee-shirt that read "Black Death Spectacle." Bright's physical protest was followed by an open letter written by Hannah Black that demanded the Whitney remove the painting, in which she wrote:

Although Schutz's intention may be to present white shame, this shame is not correctly represented as a painting of a dead Black boy by a white artist—those non-Black artists who sincerely wish to highlight the shameful nature of white violence should first of all stop treating Black pain as raw material. The subject matter is not Schutz's; white free speech and white creative freedom have been founded on the constraints of others, and are not natural rights. The painting must go.³

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Some artists and patrons responded to this protest by arguing the dangers of censorship, while many others supported removal of the painting. The controversy led to hot debates in the art-world and culminated in the Whitney's decision to stage a public discussion about race and representation within the traditionally "white" spaces of museums. The museum asked Claudia Rankine to moderate this discussion due to her work in founding the Racial Imaginary Institute, an inter-disciplinary "cultural laboratory" that explores, counters, contextualizes and demystifies cultural ideas about race.⁴ The Whitney billed the evening as a discussion about "questions around race, violence, the ethics of representation, and the limits of empathy."⁵ Although the curators of the museum did not alter the exhibit in response to the protests, the debates about representation in visual, literary, filmic and theatrical arts continues as American culture grapples with legacies of colonialism, appropriation, and white dominance. Claudia Rankine's 2018 play The White Card immerses its characters and audience in these debates and is most fully understood in this context to be refocusing not on Black experience but on the blindness about whiteness that is a traditional part of the white gaze.⁶

These protests at the Whitney serve as representative of a broader cultural reckoning over racial representation, including the 2020 We See You White American Theatre (We See You WAT) movement in theatre. BIPOC writers of the open letter to White American Theatre repeat that "we see you" ignoring stories by and about people of color, and overlooking POC for hiring in all levels of the theatre (acting, directing, designing, etc.), while using them to acquire grants and funding.⁷ This letter, cosigned by some 300 signatories calling for action within the theatre world, led to widespread responses from theatres and theatre groups, prompting theatres to quickly post statements about Diversity, Equity and Inclusion on their websites and stage more works written, directed, and produced by people of color. Both the We See You WAT movement, and the 2017 Whitney Biennial event reflect an on-going art-world conundrum: how to change the power structure that has privileged "white spaces" that whites have the privilege of not seeing as such, spaces that have either omitted the work, experience, and talent of artists of color, or problematically appropriated them. The first step toward creating change is to acknowledge how the status quo has been maintained through white blindness. [End Page 88]

White blindness, which ironically is part of the white gaze, is...