Montage from slate.com with images from Prada, Moncler and Gucci
In 1979, Ahmed Ali
Giama, a homeless Somali man, was burned alive for being black and poor in the
Piazza della Pace, in the centre of Rome. In 1985, Giacomo Valent, a 16-year-old,
was stabbed 63 times in a frenzied racist attack. In 2008, Abba, a young
Afro-Italian was beaten to death with a crowbar, his killer claiming he hadn’t
paid for a packet of biscuits. In 2012 an Italian right-wing extremist shot two
street sellers dead and wounded three others in a racist rampage. In 2018, Idy
Dienec, a Senegalese street vendor was shot dead at close range as he sold
leather bags, umbrellas and trinkets on a bridge in Florence, one of Italy’s
most popular tourist destinations. Earlier that same year a neo-Nazi
sympathizer with ties to the League, (an anti-immigrant party, recently electorally
crowned second biggest in the Italian parliament with a penchant for portraying
migrants as criminals) opened fire on African migrants in the city of Macerata,
wounding six before he was captured. Italy’s 2018 parliamentary election of the
League and the 5-Star Movement, which emerged as the largest party in the vote,
both have promised to ramp up deportations of irregular migrants.
Michelle
Bachelet, the United Nations high commissioner for human rights, announced that
she was sending staff to Italy to look into the protection of migrants
after an “alarming escalation of attacks” against asylum seekers and Roma
people.
Elaborate and persistent webs of denial and tales of
victimization spun by the state, the academe and the media have allowed Italy
to consistently escape blame and responsibility for massive atrocities
committed before and during the Second World War. Of more than 1,200 Italians
sought for war crimes in Africa and the Balkans, not one has faced justice.
Mussolini's soldiers murdered many thousands of civilians, bombed the Red
Cross, dropped poison gas, starved infants in concentration camps and tried to
annihilate cultures deemed inferior. American University of Rome historian
James Walston states, "There has been little or no coming to terms with
fascist crimes comparable to the French concern with Vichy or even the Japanese
recognition of its wartime and prewar responsibilities".
Italy didn’t
require Hitler’s help in concocting its 1938 discrimination laws against
Italian Jews.
Italy’s colonising of Libya, Eritrea, Somalia and its occupation
of Ethiopia, its gassing of, raping of, humiliation of Black subjects, its
discriminatory laws and segregation of space, its poisoning of African land, its
racist legacy and coloniality remain largely silenced and unaddressed.
Cécile
Kyenge, Italy’s minister for integration and the country’s first Black
minister has faced constant racist abuse and death threats and lives under
police protection. A fellow Italian MEP, Mario Borghezio, called her
appointment “a shitty choice” by a “bongo-bongo” government, adding that she
had “the face of a housewife”. A former vice-president of the Italian
Senate, Roberto Calderoli, said in a public meeting: “When I see pictures
of Kyenge I can’t help but think of the features of an orangutan.” Other
extreme-right politicians have called her “Zulu” and “Congolese monkey” and
have used imagery on social media to depict
the minister as an ape. Matteo Salvini, the interior minister from Lega,
compared African immigrants to slaves prompting Luxembourg’s foreign affairs
minister seated nearby to angrily respond in French: “Merde, alors !”
Present day
Italy is, by all accounts, a historically sanctioned and ongoing toxic stewpot of Afrophobia,
anti-Black racism, antisemitism, anti-Muslim hatred, xenophobia, anti-migrant
hatred, homophobia, class domination, patriarchal misogyny, cissexism and heterosexism.
I want you to think of
all of these things when luxury fashion brands like Prada, Gucci, Dolce & Gabbana
and Moncler currently embroiled in racist scandal and widespread criticism,
wring their hands in public and claim racial ignorance and cultural naiveté
when they get caught assed out. These racist corporate goblins know exactly
what they are doing. They have been trained in colonial imagery and mythmaking
and primed for the racial status quo. They bask, like gnocchi in butter, in carefully
cultivated hatreds, generations old. This they enforce with relish, beknighted
as they are by centuries of white racial legitimacy and superiority and
artistic untouchability. At worst, they know the old adage to be true, bad
publicity is still publicity. Don’t expect moral compasses where ruthless
capitalism and engagement stats prowl.
When Alessandro Michele, Gucci designer
behind the blackface balaclava valiantly grasps at straws and laments that this
was no blackface but indeed an homage to the late Leigh Bowery, a performance
artist, club promoter and fashion designer fond of flamboyant face makeup and
costumes; and a cursory Google search of Bowery reveals a slew of images of
exaggerated makeup on exclusively white foundations, know that this is
whiteness protecting itself at all costs even and especially when this runs
counter to basic logic.
When Marco Bizzarri, Gucci’s president and CEO, states
that “the lack of knowledge of diversity and the consequent understanding are
not at the level we expected, despite all the efforts we did inside the company
in the last four years” and that Gucci is now “evaluating all the processes” to
ensure “the right level of awareness and visibility” understand that this is
rich white man speak for a continued agenda of rich white man gatekeeping with
a light spackling of commodified, tokenized, whitewashed, ineffectual black and
brownness unthreatening to white supremacist hierarchies and interests.
Current
luxury fashion cannot be reformed for “diversity” and “inclusion”. It is unfit
for sustainability. Unfit for humanity. Unfit for existence on this planet. It
is not salvageable. It needs to be scrapped. To believe that this industry can
be made to care about Black bodies and to be attentive to Black pain is ahistorical
foolishness. Concentrating on individual racist imagery and products,
individual brands and designers is also problematic as it obscures the larger
poisonous picture – the systemically racist society from which they emerged and
which continues to cultivate, institutionalize and normalize colonial
imperialism, capitalist violence and white supremacist ideals.
