Among the reasons for Donald Trump's triumph, there's the champion's machismo and, in reverse, the cultural "wokism" that is alive and well on American campuses and in the arts, and which has just taken one hell of an uppercut. The White and Latino electorate alike may have been put off by ideas, works or practices designed to essentialize minorities while at the same time valorizing them. This "woke" avant-garde, viewed with indulgence by the base of the Democratic camp, has cut itself off from a real, working-class and shifting right America.
"We went too far." This phrase, in the form of a mea culpa, was heard on Wednesday, November 6, by American figures from the art world, present at the Paris Photo fair at the Grand Palais. It wasn't aimed at the fight against discrimination or the #MeToo movement, of course, but at the way in which race and gender have vampirized creation as much as social science research.
Uncle Sam has taken the lead in a cultural tribalism that writer Philip Roth prophesied in The Human Stain. In 2017, as Trump began his first term in office, the notion of cultural appropriation became a hotly debated accusation. Two White women filmmakers, Sofia Coppola and Kathryn Bigelow, were under attack because their respective films, The Beguiled and Detroit, dealt a little or a lot with the Black question. Another illegitimacy suit was brought against painter Dana Schutz, on the grounds that her painting Open Casket, denouncing the 1955 murder of a Black teenager by White supremacists, depicted Black suffering. In the same year, after a huge controversy, heterosexual actress Scarlett Johansson renounced the idea of playing a transgender icon on screen.
Since then, artists in the United States have found it best not to venture outside their own culture, especially if they are White. Before, they praised their universalism, now they denounce their creative colonialism. In 2020, three major American museums and one British one announced both the delay and reduced size of an exhibition by the White American artist Philip Guston (1913-1980), on the grounds that his paintings denouncing the Ku Klux Klan would be an appropriation of Black pain.
Also in the US, no prestigious publisher would print Seth Greenland's sixth novel, Plan Américain (published in French in 2023 by Liana Levi), on the grounds that he is White and his main character is a Black actress. Only in the US is the unthinkable question asked: Can a White artist photograph Black people? There are endless examples of this quandary. In 2022, actor Tom Hanks ratified this jurisprudence by saying that he would today refuse the role in Philadelphia (1993) that won him an Oscar, because of the "inauthenticity of a straight man playing a gay man." Aghast, French actor Vincent Dedienne retorted on France Inter radio station that as much as Tom Hanks isn't gay, Denzel Washington, his lawyer in the film, isn't a lawyer in real life.
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