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To Whom It May Concern:

If a white conductor is the artist and the orchestra his instrument why isn't it culture appropriation to play a black composer's music?

There was a white establishment modern artist named Dana Schutz (a woman) who exhibited an expressionist-type painting of Emmet Till at a Whitney Biennial a few years ago. (You could only tell it was Emmet Till by the title.) She was accused of appropriating the victim status of Till and I think the Whitney took the painting down, or did something else contrite.

If a horribly oppressed white woman (one of her paintings went for $1.4M at auction) cannot get away with something like that how on earth can a member of the ultimate oppressor group do it? Surely, the next step is to demand that conductors must be black in order to interpret the lived black experience.

– Confused, lonely and freaked out

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