"Just a case of unfortunate timing": Photo of White Woman sitting on a chair made from the mannequin of a tied-up, half-naked black woman - published on MLK Day

White Over Black System From [HERE] Last week, Russian fashion designer and editor-in-chief of Garage magazine Dasha Zhukova apologised after a photo of her sitting on a chair made from the mannequin of a tied-up, half-naked black woman was published by the Russian fashion website, Buro 24/7. The picture attracted condemnation and accusations of racism, particularly as the photograph was uploaded on America’s Martin Luther King Day.

The white writer of this article assures us that "as Vanessa Murray points out on the Vine given the publication and the subject are Russian, this is more likely to be of a case of unfortunate timing rather than deliberate insensitivity."

Commenting on the outcry, Guardian art critic Jonathan Jones rejected claims that the artwork is racist: “Offensiveness in art is often a way to satirise injustice. But this provocative sculpture has been naively injected into a popular culture whose default mode, in the Twitter age, is to catch out celebrities and call them names – racist!”

I agree that art plays a vital and important role in conversations about oppression. Indeed, as pointed out by Leigh Silver at Complex, “The problem may not be the chair itself, but the fact that Zhukova, a privileged white woman, is sitting on a completely powerless black woman.” While Melgaard’s art satirically turned the black woman into an object, Zhukova – subject of the photo and owner of the artwork in question – is literally using the black woman as an object. [MORE]

In their relations with non-whites, white people function as psychopaths. [MORE]

The third Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (1980), published by the American Psychiatric Association, contains a description of the narcissistic personality disorder, with the following stated criteria:

A. Grandiose sense of self importance or uniqueness

B. Preoccupation with fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance, beauty, or ideal love

C.  Exhibitionistic: Requires constant attention and admiration

D.  Responds to criticism, indifference of others, or defeat with either cool indifference or with marked feelings of rage, inferiority, shame, humiliation, or emptiness

E. Two of the following:

1.  Lack of empathy: Inability to recognize how others feel

2.  Entitlement: Expectation of special favors with reactions or surprise and anger when others don't comply

3. Interpersonal exploitiveness: Takes advantage of others to indulge his own desires or for self-aggrandizement, with disregard for the personal integrity and rights of others

4. Relationships characteristically vacillate between the extremes of over-idealization and devaluation.

According to Frances Cress Welsing [HERE] "any non-white person who has had extensive experience with whites, collectively or as individuals, will find in the above a description of those relationships. At a superficial level, it seems ironic that those responsible for including this disorder in theDiagnostic and Statistical Manual have failed to recognize this as a statement that characterizes the global relationship of whites to non-whites, a description of the dynamic (racism)." [MORE]