Politics will soon have its own box at the opera house. 

It could be said that the opening act of the buzzy “Emmett Till, a New American Opera” transpired in the days before its premiere last week, when a student at John Jay School of Criminal Justice, on whose premises the work was performed, circulated a petition to cancel the work.

Despite misstating the opera’s title, the petition has garnered 12,000 signatures. It argued that the librettist, Clare Coss, who describes herself as being “born white in a racist world,” had “creatively centered her white guilt by using this play to make the racially motivated brutal torture and murder of a 14-year-old child about her white self and her white feelings.” 

It accused Ms. Coss of “taking it upon herself to turn Black trauma into entertainment and for exploiting a Black tragedy to propel her career and relieve her of her guilt about her whiteness.” 

The composer, Mary Watkins, and the conductor, Tania León, a 2021 winner of the Pulitzer prize, are both black. 

The brouhaha around the opera suggests a snapshot of how the arts will fare in an age of cancellation and at a moment when talk of censorship has emerged as a feature and not an occasional hiccup in the creative landscape. Increasingly, the creative arts, which so often have been in the van of free expression and allowed to offend, have become a danger zone for those alert to threats to freedom of speech. 

Just last week, the fiction group Lamba Literary pulled a nomination for a literary award from writer Lauren Hough for tweets that “harmfully engaged” with readers and demonstrated  “troubling hostility toward transgender critics and trans-allies.”

This fall, the composer of “Wicked” opined that “everyone in the arts in America is talking about the tyranny of cancel culture and cultural appropriation. The funny thing is, no one dares to say it aloud. It’s like living in a totalitarian state.” 

The president of the Romance Writers of America said that “it is our greatest hope that we can create a safe space for all writers.”           

Staged against this backdrop, “Emmett Till” is a look at the past via the lens of the present. In linear fashion, it tells the story of the murder of its eponymous protagonist, a 14-year-old black youth from Chicago who was lynched in 1955 in Mississippi for allegedly offending a white woman. 

The grave injustices of his murder and subsequent acquittal of his killers — they confessed a month later, in a magazine interview — are often seen as landmarks on the path to the civil rights movement. “The Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crime Act” allows investigations to be reopened into unsolved violent crimes against blacks perpetrated before 1970. 

Till’s legacy came to the fore again  this week as President Biden signed into law the Emmett Till Anti-Lynching Act, which labels lynching a federal hate crime and includes a maximum 30 year prison sentence for conspiring to committ a lynching. Congressman Bobby Rush, who sponsored the bill, noted “Emmett Till would have been 80 years old today.”

After a fashion, “A New American Opera” is one such revisiting of a cold case. The opera’s approach to race begins with its staging. There are on either side of the stage separate white and black choruses who are identified as such in the playbill. These in turn mirror the three black and three white members of the cast, likewise stationed on opposing sides of the proscenium.

Emmett Till is played by tenor Robert Mack as an innocent young boy, which by all accounts is exactly what he was. One of the most heartrending numbers is called ,“He is Just a Boy, He Didn’t Know.” Mr. Mack, however, is no longer a boy, which necessitates a suspension of disbelief on the part of both the cast and audience. Lucia Bradford, a Mezzo-Soprano, plays Mamie Till with compelling pathos and emotional resonance. 

The opera’s only invented character has proved to be its lightning rod. A fictional white school teacher, Roanne Taylor, played by mezzo soprano Abigail Wright, is described by Ms. Closs in a program note as someone who “cares, but is silent.” Ms. Closs elaborates that “she represents what Martin Luther King Jr. called the ultimate tragedy: the silence of the good people.” 

The opera follows Taylor, who is opposed to Jim Crow and segregation but who ultimately fails to speak out against Till’s murder. Ms. Coss describes an earlier version of the play, titled, “Emmett, Down in My Heart,” as centered on “Roanne Taylor’s journey toward a sense of responsibility,” a focus that has fueled the backlash to this play.

Even if this emphasis does feel strangely placed, the calls for cancellation of “A New American Opera” promise cultural injury far more grievous than sanctimony.  “If we are going to tell the story of Emmett Till,” reads the petition by critics of the play, “it should only be from a Black perspective, a Black writer, and permission and approval from Till’s family.”

It’s a view that contrasts with the vision of the cultural critic and author Susan Sontag, who foresaw the danger of being held hostage in the cultural landscape and wrote of literature as “the passport to enter a larger life; that is, the zone of freedom.”