Artist Hannah Black called for the piece's removal and destruction in an open letter co-signed by other artists and curators. "Those non-Black artists who sincerely wish to highlight the shameful nature of white violence should first of all stop treating Black pain as raw material."Later in March, several news outlets published part of a fake letter purporting to be from the artist, Dana Schutz, also calling for the painting's removal.After the Whitney Museum spent an evening discussing the controversy, with an event co-hosted by the Racial Imaginary Institute , three attendees discussed the controversy for art magazine Hyperallergic in The Possibilities and Failures of the Racial Imagination:

The other glaring failure of the white imagination that I see here — both in Schutz and in the Whitney, which is, at the end of the day, a white institution, despite having enlisted two Asian Americans to curate the biennial — is the complete inability to foresee how Black viewers might respond to that painting. This failure is so absurd, honestly, that I find myself coming to the appalling conclusion that it might never have even occurred to Schutz or the higher-ups at the Whitney that Black viewers would see the painting.