The Trouble With Whiteness

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.