Those images are straight out of racist stereotypes of black people that claimed that they were not human and didn’t look human. “But they’re just monkeys!” is the usual response. Well, look at actual monkeys. No, this is a racist anti-black stereotype, and those bright red lips are an extreme exaggeration invented in order to de-humanize black people. It’s the same kind of thing as the huge hooked nose that racist drawings of Jews always have.
Whether it’s old racist drawings of Irish immigrants in the UK and USA or of Jews in Nazi Germany, that kind of dehumanizing, if left unchecked, frees up racists to damage or kill their targets with impunity.
There’s no excuse for anyone to resurrect those images, there isn’t any “ironic” or hip way to make them any less filthy than they are.
Yeah. And a broader, older tradition of racist stereotyping than just black face. Like there’s a lot of this in post colonial African folk art.
And all of it’s kind of inter related. Like the gollywog is directly based on minstrel/black face. Even if the Dutch colonial depictions, or earlier ones weren’t.
Wow. Holy fucking shit. I mean that really isn’t subtle, is it? I mean how… how does multiple products like that get designed, approved, and made and no one was like, “Hey, this kinda reminds me of something racist. Maybe should change the design - at last change the color scheme.”
I realize Prada is Italian, but even with out American Blackface as part of their history, it also mimics the depictions of Africans by colonizers in the 1800s and 1900s. I am just flabbergasted.
If I ever make so much money that I would consider dropping $500 on a key chain, I am going to take my money elsewhere…
I’m willing to go with an assumption of intentional racism at this point. A little over a year ago a Prada subsidiary, Miu Miu, had a controversy over their yellow star clothes. They are a company big enough and media savvy enough to implement controls after their first big public racism blow up. I honestly wouldn’t be surprised if they saw a small bump in sales after the first incident and wrote it up as free publicity and went for another round.
One of the earliest depictions I saw of that particular visual trope that I remember is from Tintin - Tintin in the Congo specifically. It’s definitely not a foreign to Europe.
Last year I was in a antique mall when I saw some black sambo halloween masks being sold.That shit needs to be in a museum someplace, along side nazi paraphernalia and civil war monuments. That we havent put this crap in a museum frame, means we’re going to see it on the shelves for sale instead.
Eew. Even if I say “ok somehow they didn’t notice their dark colored monkeys with big red lips and round white eyes look racist as hell” I’m still suck with but how does a fashion house think this looks anything but completely tacky and ugly. Like at best it’s unfashionable and trashy looking, not in an edgy way but in a
junk shop" way… But I think really it’s just that they don’t care. They don’t care if it’s racist, they don’t care if it’s ugly, they just make gaudy shit for rich people to waste money on. So… that’s their fashion sense. Nice.
best case scenario, if this truly did start out as incredibly inexcusable tone deafness and insensitivity, it also tells me that their company needs a lot more diversity as a whole because this made it from design to finished produced product in front of the public.
only those born to privilege even have the luxury of being so insensitive to the experience of others and foster environments where workers either won’t speak up or aren’t heard and products like this can make it to store shelves.
I agree education is critical if we aren’t to repeat past mistakes or sweep their significance under the rug. places like a museum exhibit where they can be discussed in a much larger and informed context are one of the few appropriate venues for such dialogue, but even then such discussions are difficult and tricky as these symbols still hold a lot of power and should be considered unacceptable in most context and treated with sensitivity and care.
