While this indeed looks absolutely horrible and is extremely tone deaf, and probably even does show some kind of level of closeted racism by the minister, for choosing to proceed with this, this was an art piece about racism and the issues of female genital mutilation (most common in countries of Africa) by a Swedish POC artist, and all of this happened within an exhibition about artistic freedoms, to which the minister got invited to and all of this happened over a decade ago. I remember reading about it when it happened. Not exactly news, not sure why post it now.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Makode_Linde#Painful_Cake_2012
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lena_Adelsohn_Liljeroth#Political_Life
A minister of culture should have had enough sense to look at the insanely racist cake, look back to the artist and say “no, thank you”. This is definitely a topic that need to be discussed but there are better ways than a blackface cake. Just because an artist is out there being stupid doesn’t mean we have to sit by and say “ooh how provocative”.
Linde made the cake with a full on golliwog face and said it’s meant to represent how white people consumed black people (which I think he made up after the controversy, frankly). Why would a minister of culture be like “yes, please, let me be the white person you speak of”.
Gross.
I just found out about this, and frankly I was speechless when I did. The fact that nobody realized just how phenomenally offensive the whole stunt was shows just how prevalent racism is in Sweden. Let’s not pretend that this mindset changed in the past decade.
This piece of information is from 2012. We’re in 2022.
Is there any evidence that the culture in Sweden changed substantially in that time?
yeah but you know, that’s an artistic performance.
“call for minister’s dismissal”
They could FIRE a cashier for a 3 eur gap but “ASK for dismissal” when it’s a minister doing something totally fucked up.
