One reason for the hullabaloo around Dana Schutz’s painting of the murdered Emmett Till in the current Whitney Biennial is the weakness of the work. It looks half-baked, unresolved. Like a lot of recent “political” art, it doesn’t try for a weight suitable to, and therefore respectful of, its racially charged, morally shattering subject. The result, to use one writer’s words, is “a tasty abstraction designed purposefully or inadvertently” to evoke an image of “common oppression.”

Actually, those dismissive words weren’t written about the Schutz painting. They were written in 1970 by the African-American critic Linda La Rue about the vaunted cross-cultural embrace of the second-wave feminist movement. The writer eyed with deep distrust the movement’s assumption that it could speak with authority for all women, including black women.

Ms. La Rue’s words are in the catalog for the exhibition “We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965-85” at the Brooklyn Museum. And her critical perspective is one that to a large degree shapes this spare-looking show, which takes a textured view of the political past — a past that is acquiring renewed weight in the immediate present when the civil rights gains, including feminist gains, of the past half-century appear to be up for grabs.

Whether those gains have ever not been up for grabs is a question to consider, though the show asks more specific historical ones. Such as: What did women’s liberation, primarily a white, middle-class movement, have to offer African-American women in a country where, as late as the 1960s, de facto slavery still existed; a country where racism, which the movement itself shared, was soaked into the cultural fabric? Under the circumstances, to be black, female and pursuing a career in art was a radical move.