On Tuesday morning June 25 the above image was uploaded to Vogue Italia’s social media, the editor of Photo Vogue’s Instagram and the Vogue Italia website. It was simply captioned, with no context given and posted. Backlash ensued. The image which features a black man in white robes and a white pointed hood seems eerily resemblant to a white terror group that wreaked havoc on the African American community. By wreak havoc I mean systematic racial violence, beatings, arsons, kidnappings, rapes, lynchings, and other murders of African Americans. White men in white robes and pointed hoods, they called themselves the KLU KLUX KLAN or KKK as they became known. The artist behind this work, Morroccan-Belgian artist Mous Lamrabat, quickly took to social media either deleting the criticism or telling people they were misinterpreting the image. He then posted a story explaining that he was referencing Spanish Nazarenos and Easter Sunday costumes.

That explanation seemingly intended to quiet the critics backfired as commenters pointed out he had captioned the image “KOUSKOUSKLAN” a clear allusion in the minds of many to the KLU KLUX KLAN. He followed that with a statement “Fear is a tricky thing, what if we take symbols that fear us and bring it in a way that it becomes something we can smile at?”.

To me it seems that Lamrabat thinks by simply adding a pop culture fashion symbol like the NIKE swoosh on the hood that it suddenly becomes something funny. In a January interview with Vogue Italia the artist also says combining things that people have an emotional connection with, with “fashionable vibes” creates a new appreciation. Put quite simply in relation to the image in the center of this controversy, Lamrabat, a non black POC is telling we black POC that how we experience and deal with the racial trauma of our past is wrong. Enough tears! Let’s laugh.

Another blow comes in the form of Vogue Italia co-signing this. I don’t think I need to reiterate the overwhelming pain and destruction the Klu klux Klan inflicted on the African American community when they were in the height of the movement some 50 years ago. The KKK is also still alive today and in many a southern state those white robes are still hanging in white supremacists closet. So no thank you Vogue Italia and Mous Lamrabat I don’t want to smile at this image that still strikes fear into the heart of many African Americans.

A conversation ( I say that with a hint of sarcasm) with Alessia Glaviano, one of the editors at Vogue Italia left me without a doubt that they were only interested in discussing and understanding racism on a surfacial and superficial level. In the above exchange I tried simply to make her understand that the casual manner in which she and Vogue Italia posted the image without fully understanding that this imagery is incredibly insensitive and triggering for many African Americans. My attempts were met with defensiveness and condescendence not to mention she pretty much called me narrow-minded and limiting. Ms. Glaviano states that an outsiders view can be enriching which I agree with at times, but when it comes to racial trauma or any kind of trauma an outsider telling victims how to feel is anything but enriching. I don’t expect a white woman to understand something like the feeling a black person gets when they see a KKK hood, or the police, or when a white person calls them a nigger but I do expect empathy and understanding of why we feel that way instead of making it about themselves. She closed our discussion with an accusation of me faking to misunderstand her words in order to make a scene thus transferring the “victim status” to herself. At that point I said to myself these people really don’t get it, and that’s a problem when they want to try and make a statement without understanding anything of the subject matter.

The artist Lamrabat began blocking anyone who voiced an opposing opinion including myself and deleted the image but quickly posted an image of a man with his face obscured with balloons captioned “maybe this is better than…I’m very sorry but ignorants won again.”

In this case ignorants being the black POC that found his work disrespectful. To me that statement right there was very telling of the motives of this body of work. He wants to tell our story, and he wants to tell us how we should feel and react to it. How dare we think otherwise. This isn’t about censorship or cultural appropriation, this is about how we black people heal from, in our own time, from an incredibly tragic part of our history and that that process should be respected and not commoditized for provocation purposes and fame. It’s our narrative. Let us choose how we tell it.