Creativity Quote by Henry Ossawa Tanner

A quiet act of defiance hides inside Tanner's measured sentence. He refuses the era's preferred script: that Blackness is either a stain to be denied or a burden to be endured in silence. "Counts" is the key word - an accounting term, a verdict, a claim to value in a society that kept meticulous ledgers of racial hierarchy. By repeating it, Tanner turns the logic of measurement back on the measurers. If the world insists on tallying blood, he will decide what the tally means.

The phrase "to my advantage" is neither naive optimism nor simple pride. It's a strategic inversion. Tanner is asserting that his identity sharpens his vision, his seriousness, his discipline - the very qualities the art world often pretended were incompatible with Black artists. The line reads like a rebuttal to patronizing praise and exclusion alike: he will not accept success as an exception granted by whiteness, nor will he perform gratitude for being tolerated.

Then comes the hard splice: "though it has caused me... humiliation and sorrow". Tanner doesn't romanticize suffering as artistic fuel; he names it as damage. The subtext is a demand to hold both truths at once: racial identity can be a source of power and still be punished by a racist world. In the context of a Black American artist who found greater possibility in Europe while remaining marked by American racial ideology, the quote functions as a personal manifesto - not an autobiography of pain, but a declaration of self-definition under coercion.