Why THAT Dead White Guy?

An open-ended question, an important conversation

A lot of people today see human life as a zero-sum conflict between identity categories. The great game of all social interaction is to uplift the oppressed and diminish the oppressors. In this view, there’s some finite amount of social respect we all have available to distribute - you can’t uplift the good guys without first diminishing the bad guys. 

This is a frame that I see behind the ‘dead white guy’ trope - artistic events that feature the work of major figures of the Western past often start with someone coming out and acknowledging that the amazing art we’re here to see is the unfortunately the work of a dead white guy, which means we have to diminish its social standing to make room for art from new identity categories. They don’t explicitly say this, of course - this information is maybe delivered in the form of an off-hand joke, but we cannot not acknowledge it. Identity is the ultimate form of reality, where God once was, and must be ritually acknowledged and worshipped and prayed to for moral direction.

One thing I always wonder whenever anyone spits on a dead white guy for being a dead white guy is this: why that dead white guy? Of all the dead white guys of the past, why did that one manage to make an impact? If art is nothing but a vehicle for promoting the interests of the ruling class, as all things are, what explains the varying levels of success that dead white guys have had over the years? Is it corruption all the way down? Or are there worthy reasons why people keep coming back to some artists more so than others?

I’d assert that there is something that even the most focused opponents of dead white guys can get from dead white guy art, some insight or inspiration, even after the revolution has passed. I think there really is something called ‘the sublime’, something that can be found in art from any source, something that differentiates good art from bad, something that’s lost when art is first and foremost taken as an opportunity for a moral lecture or an affirmative action initiative. 

That’s not to say that art can’t be morally instructive, or that getting people from disadvantaged social groups into artistic production is somehow bad. I think those things are good! And I think they become bad when they displace the sublime as the central function of art. 

There’s an awful lot of art that has been so displaced - the revolution has happened, and a lot of people have achieved cultural power without ever changing their self-image as the ever-precious oppressed. Which op-ed do you think would cause a bigger uproar: a white guy writing that hip hop is overrated and that everyone should read Shakespeare? Or a black woman writing that Shakespeare is overrated and that everyone should listen to hip hop?  

I hope, someday, for people from historically-disadvantaged groups to have the opportunity to flourish on their own terms without the impediments of discrimination. And then to realize that being human is hard no matter what, even without social bullshit. To be human is to suffer and fail, to live with regret and die with unfinished business. To be a fully-realized citizen is to realize that you have nobody else to blame for it.