The Untold Story Of Lyndie B. Hawkins

Hidden Brain

Hidden Brain Media

Arts, Science, Performing Arts, Social Sciences

4.6 • 40.4K Ratings

🗓️ 20 July 2020

⏱️ 50 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In 2019, a novel by a new author, Gail Shepherd, arrived in bookstores. The True History of Lyndie B. Hawkins tells the story of a young white girl growing up in the South. The book has been well received, but it is not the book Shepherd intended to write. In her original drafts, Shepherd, a white author, created a Lyndie who was Vietnamese-American, and dealing with issues of race in the deep South. This week we look at what it means to be a storyteller in a time of caustic cultural debate and ask when, if ever, is it okay to tell a story that is not your own?

Transcript

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0:00.0	A note before we get started, this story begins with a reference to the 1955 lynching of 14-year-old
0:06.8	Emmett Till. There's also a moment in the episode in which a guest describes being called
0:13.1	the N-word. This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedanta. Every two years, the Whitney Museum in New
0:23.1	York hosts a special exhibit featuring contemporary American art. The show is a big deal. It draws crowds
0:32.2	from around the world and can turn artists into stars. But in 2017, one painting in a fifth floor
0:41.1	gallery prompted a barrage of criticism over race and appropriation. The painting was called
0:48.4	Open Casket. Its artist Dana Schutts' interpretation of a famous photograph of Emmett Till. He was the
0:57.4	young black boy brutally beaten and killed by two white men in Mississippi in 1955. His mother
1:05.6	made me tell insisted on an open casket funeral so the world could see what these men had done to her
1:13.2	little boy. Decades later, she described the moment in a documentary, the untold story of Emmett
1:21.0	Lewis Till. I said I want the world to see this because there's no way I can tell this story
1:29.0	and give them the visual picture of what my son looked like. The photograph of Emmett Till in
1:36.2	the Open Casket remains a painful but powerful touchstone for many, a reminder of the suffering
1:43.0	produced by racial injustice. Dana Schutts, who is white, interpreted the photo in a way that
1:54.9	was more abstract but also disturbing. Emmett Till's suit is crisp and pristine. The brutality
2:04.0	inflicted on his face is represented with slashing strokes of browns and reds. Shortly after Schutts'
2:13.2	painting appeared at the Whitney, dozens of artists of color demanded that it be removed and destroyed.
2:22.0	Before the graph of Emmett Till, they felt was not open to interpretation by a white artist.
2:28.1	It was not okay, they said, to use black paint as raw material for white creativity.
2:35.5	African American author and radio producer Rebecca Carroll said she understood why people were so upset.
2:43.8	Schutts' work, she said, is not what Mimi Till would have wanted. When she said I want them to see
2:52.6	this image, she meant Dana Schutts, you know what I'm saying? She meant that it was white
	...

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