There has been quite a fuss about “Emmett Till: A New American Opera,” which apparently survived efforts to cancel two performances this week at John Jay College in New York City.
Till was the Chicago teenager who was kidnapped and killed by two white men while visiting relatives in the Mississippi Delta in 1955 for the insult of whistling at a white woman. After his body was recovered from the Tallahatchie River, his mother famously insisted on an open-casket funeral to show the world what had happened to her son.
Till’s death was a galvanizing event for the civil rights movement, displaying in cold brutality what could happen to Black people, even 14-year-olds, who ran afoul of the South’s rigid segregation code of the era.
The first question might be, how can this kind of horrible crime be turned into an opera? But the real complaint is coming from Black people who dislike the fact that the opera’s lyricist is a white woman. They also object to a fictional white character in the opera, a woman whose perspective about civil rights gradually changes.
The Black Opera Alliance, a group of artists pushing for “racial equity and systemic change” in opera, said in a statement that “we denounce the telling of this historic story by a white woman and from a white vantage point. It is time for Black creators to be given opportunities to expand the operatic canon with authentic storytelling from our own perspectives.”
A John Jay student gathered 12,000 online signatures on a petition to cancel the opera, claiming the lyricist was using it to address her feelings of white guilt.
These objections are overdone. In fact, extremely overdone.
The Black Opera Alliance acknowledged Black artists and others involved in the production — in fact, the opera’s composer is Black. The composer said in an email to The Washington Post that it is an insult to her and other Black artists to assume that they had no input into the final product. She said Blacks were not being forced to tell the white lyricist’s story.
What’s really bothersome about the complaints is the contention that non-Blacks must stay far away from the subject of a Black teenager’s lynching. As if whites have not produced moving and informative books, TV shows and films about civil rights stories.
To take this silly argument to its logical conclusion, Lin-Manuel Miranda had no business creating the musical “Hamilton” because of his Puerto Rican and Mexican ancestry. To go one ridiculous step further, since opera is an art form created in Europe, should non-whites really be a part of it?
The Black Opera Alliance statement about the Emmett Till performance calls for more opportunities for Black creators. Absolutely correct: If there are artificial barriers, they should be removed. Let’s hear all voices.
The Washington Post column about the opera compared it to drivers at a traffic intersection deciding who has the right of way. There is nothing stopping artists of any background from producing work about civil rights. And as any driver knows, at an intersection everyone eventually gets their turn to move forward.
Jack Ryan, Enterprise-Journal
