Last fall, I walked out of a Kara Walker exhibit because the white couple beside me kept taking selfies. I’d gone to the Broad Museum in Los Angeles to see African’t, Walker’s black paper silhouettes depicting a dreamy and disturbing antebellum South. I felt jarred watching the smiling pair pose in front of horrifying images: A dismembered white explorer roasts on a spit; a plantation owner rapes an enslaved woman; a white girl fondles a black boy while another shoots air up his ass.

Later, I wondered why I’d walked away. The couple meant no harm; people take pictures in museums all the time. But I resented, or maybe envied, how easily they delighted in the spectacle of Walker’s art, while I found it hard even to look.

If images of slavery make you uncomfortable, then good luck going to the movies. Over the past decade, the entertainment industry has shown a renewed interest in telling stories about the lives of slaves. The Daily Beast declared 2013 “the year of the slavery film,” anticipating the release of 12 Years a Slave, based on Solomon Northup’s 1853 autobiography, and Belle, which followed a mixed-race aristocrat in eighteenth-century England. An interest in slavery narratives has also extended to television this past year, with Underground, a WGN America series about the Underground Railroad, and a reboot of Roots.

In January, an online debate erupted among black writers when Birth of a Nation, Nate Parker’s film about Nat Turner’s 1831 insurrection, was purchased for a record $17.5 million at Sundance. At Jezebel, Kara Brown wrote that while Turner’s rebellion is a “fascinating story, an important one, and an under-examined one,” she felt ambivalent about seeing yet another film “that centers around the brutalization of black people” for entertainment. At The Nation, Mychal Denzel Smith disagreed, counting only seven major studio releases in all of film history that have centered on American slavery, including Amistad (1997), Glory (1989), and Gone With the Wind (1939). “I want a Marvel Universe of films about slavery,” he wrote. “I want so many films about slavery that white actors start to complain that the only roles they’re being offered are those of slave owners.”

What does it mean when white audiences are suddenly so eager to consume narratives of black suffering? And is this preferable, or even progressive, compared to their long history of looking away? During the Oscar campaign for 12 Years a Slave, leaked ballots from Academy members revealed that some voters simply chose not to view the film. “Look, I’ve lived long enough to know what it was like to be a black person in America,” one voter wrote. “What I don’t want is more terrible stuff to keep in my head.” Centuries later, the history of slavery hovers like the sun. We feel its presence always, but we cannot bear to stare directly at it.