When Outrage Is Selective: Art, Race, and the Limits of (The West’s) Moral Universality

In 2022, Western museums and biennials rallied around cultural boycotts of Russia. Artistic communities withdrew from exhibitions, institutions suspended collaborations, and a moral consensus rapidly coalesced: We will not legitimize violence. Yet this fervour often collapses when faced with other ongoing catastrophes — whether in Gaza, Yemen, or Sudan — and raises a broad question: Why is only some violence deemed boycott‑worthy?

The answer lies in how moral universality is situated within global power and racial hierarchies.

To appreciate this, we must turn not only to institutions with their stated principles but also to how ethics are conscripted selectively within cultural discourse. When violence is perpetrated by geopolitical “Others,” it becomes condemnable. When it is supported, enabled, or ignored by Western alliances, outrage is muted, deflected, or reframed as “complex conflict.”

This is not just bad politics; it’s a structural problem of universalism — what Zahi Zalloua, Cushing Eells Professor of Philosophy and Literature and a professor of Indigeneity, Race, and Ethnicity Studies at Whitman College (USA), describes as the necessity to rethink who constitutes the universal subject of moral concern. In Universal Politics, Zalloua argues that genuine universality emerges not from abstract humanism but from the “part of no‑part” — the marginalized and excluded whose suffering exposes the limits of our claims to moral universality.

He writes: “What grounds a universal politics, as well as giving it its emancipatory orientation, is the part of no‑part: the universal reveals itself, after all, through what is missing… the socioeconomically dispossessed, the migrant/refugee, the racialized…”

If the very idea of universality is predicated on what the system excludes, then Western institutions’ selective empathy tells us something essential: some lives are treated as fully human and grievable, others not.

This dynamic resonates with Slavoj Žižek’s broader critique of ideology as the unexamined condition shaping discourse. Žižek has repeatedly shown that cultural narratives often obscure the very power relations that produce suffering in the first place — and that moral clarity is frequently aligned with geopolitical interests rather than consistent principles. In other words, ideology shapes which violences can be named, and which must be contained within existing power structures.

When we see widespread cultural boycotts of Russian institutions — but not of Western or Gulf cultural events connected to states implicated in severe violence — we are witnessing ideology at work, not principle alone.

This dissonance is exemplified by how institutions such as MoMA or biennials in the Gulf continue to operate as global platforms with little moral reckoning over their geopolitical entanglements. For artists, refusing Russia may carry minimal risk to one’s career, whereas refusing New York or European platforms often means professional erasure. In this sense, ethical expectations are enforced downward, while institutional power goes unchecked.

Zalloua’s work helps us think beyond this double standard by reframing the Palestinian struggle — for example — as integral to global solidarity among the excluded. In Solidarity and the Palestinian Cause, he emphasizes how struggles against racial domination and economic exploitation are interlocking, and how the Palestinian cause has fostered reciprocal solidarity with movements like Black Lives Matter.

This is not a call for moral equivalence, but for a universal politics that refuses the comfort of selective empathy. A politics that sees the bombing of Ukrainian cities alongside the grinding violence in Gaza, Yemen, or Sudan not as separate moral categories but as interconnected manifestations of a global order that privileges some lives over others.

Art institutions bear a particular responsibility here. When they frame boycotts as ethical gestures against violence in one context but continue business as usual in others, they inadvertently replicate the very hierarchies that make such violence possible. Instead of moral posturing, what is needed is structural honesty — a willingness to interrogate why some violences are visible and others are not.

A universal artistic ethics cannot thrive when outrage is selective and moral concern is calibrated by race or geopolitical convenience. If the art world wants to live up to its claims of being a space of critical reflection and social imagination, it must confront not just particular acts of violence, but the frameworks that determine which violences are named and which are neglected.

This means not only boycotting when it is easy and career‑safe, but confronting — publicly and consistently — the full range of structural violence that infuses our global cultural economy. Only then can we begin to move toward a truly universal politics of art.

Ray Thek is a pseudonym for a Myanmar writer who needs to remain anonymous.