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Primark removes 'racist' shirt


Erik

Primark removes 'racist' shirts  

56 members have voted

  1. 1. Were the shirts racist and offensive?

    • Yes, the shirts were racist and offensive.
    • No, the shirts weren't racist and offensive.
  2. 2. Did Primark do the right thing by removing the shirts from their stores?

    • Yes, they did the right thing by removing the shirts.
    • No, they didn't do the right thing by removing the shirts.


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Recently, Primark started selling new shirts. The company sold a shirt with a reference to The Walking Dead.

 

0eXv2Wc.jpg

 

--mild spoilers for TWD season 6--

 

The shirt said 'Eeny, Meeny, Miny, Moe' with a picture of a gore baseball bat wrapped with wire around it. This is a reference to The Walking Dead season 6 episode 8 finale where the new villain Negan needs to pick a victim to kill with his baseball bat. He does this by singing the song and therefore picking his victim. Eeny, Meeny, Miny, Moe.. catch a tiger by his toe. 

 

However, some people considered this racist. Mainly due to the fact that the song was slightly different about 100+ years ago when slavery was still legal. The song went: Eeny, Meeny, Miny, Moe.. catch a nigger by his toe. Some people associated it with The Walking Dead reference and urged Primark to remove the clothes with the 'racist' quote. Primark decided to remove the clothes under peer pressure and due to the fact that some people considered it racist.

http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/eeny-meeny-miny-mo.html

 

My opinion? I don't consider the shirts racist or offensive at all. A popular modern TV show that's about fighting zombies and uses a popular song shouldn't be associated with slavery, to me it sounds like people just feel the need to complain about something. Ofcourse, the song was bad earlier but this has nothing to do with racism. People shouldn't get triggered and offended over these small little things these days. 

 

So, were the shirts indeed racist? And did Primark do the right thing by removing them? Share your thoughts!

 

 

 

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They can remove it if they want but its not racist at all imo. Like you said "A popular modern TV show that's about fighting zombies and uses a popular song shouldn't be associated with slavery,"

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So because something at one point was associated with a thing we know to be bad that thing must now forever be associated with it? That's incredibly stupid, so obviously this isn't racist. Yes them removing the shirt is their own choice and that's fine, but I really don't think anyone should be bending the knee to people who call racist at everything that even remotely had a racist connotation decades ago.

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The etymology or origin of a word or song shouldn't matter if time has made the definition obsolete or even different.

 

Retarded just meant "having an IQ of 70 or lower iirc ". If society has changed this definition to just mean "stupid", then that definition should be used. It shouldn't be in disuse because of a reason that was relevant 30 years ago.

 

Same in this case. If "Eeny Meeny Miny Moe" was a song about slavery, but society has changed it to fit modern standards, then its origin as a slavery song is irrelevant.

 

Primark shouldn't have to remove the shirt for water that has been under the bridge for the longest time.

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just wondering, did he beat a black person in the show? i don't watch it.

Major spoiler

 

 

 

He beat the crap out of a ginger and a Korean guy. There were no black actors involved in that scene.

 

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He beat the crap out of a ginger and a Korean guy. There were no black actors involved in that scene.

eh, seems fine then. if he'd beaten a black person in the show i could see how it could be seen as racist, even though i don't really think it would of been. 

primark were just avoiding bad rep from a vocal minority who think they're fighting racism when they're missing the real racism that happens directly to people everyday. 

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Funny how this is actually old news, but legit overall it is pretty stupid for some weak minded person to say that's racist but no one gets triggered either way, just depends on the context you say it in

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It is very racist, the problem is none of you know it's racist because you weren't even born when shit like that was said. That was a typical line said when white supremacists would hunt down blacks and hang or lynch them in the south. Try doing some research before you go skipping to conclusions in your millennial worlds.  

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It is very racist, the problem is none of you know it's racist because you weren't even born when shit like that was said. That was a typical line said when white supremacists would hunt down blacks and hang or lynch them in the south. Try doing some research before you go skipping to conclusions in your millennial worlds.  

Regardless of its origins it intentions are far from racist on this shirt, kids still sing this loads and no-ones crying about it.

The article quote:

"It is directly threatening of a racist assault, and if I were black and were faced by a wearer I would know just where I stood." 

 

Surprise, a white person was offended by this shirt. Most people do not care or are aware of its origin and it's certainly not being used in a racist manner.

If it was such a big deal where was the outcry when it was used on the show? Or when children are taught this by their parents?

 

 

Using the word millennial to remind others that you're old is really cool btw :^) 

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I would say the shirt wasn't offensive. The connotations and letter of the song have changed over time, and these days it's just a nursery rhyme for entertaining kids when you need them to sit still for a minute. I'd argue that Primark did the wrong thing by removing these shirts. Many people these days purposely get offended at things just because they enjoy the feeling of what they perceive or choose to perceive as "righteous indignation". Give these people what they want, and they feel as though their stance has become justified by the rest of society. This just feeds back upon itself the next time something like this happens. That's not to say there's never a situation in which caving to peer pressure is an ok thing to do, this just wasn't one of them.

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It is very racist, the problem is none of you know it's racist because you weren't even born when shit like that was said. That was a typical line said when white supremacists would hunt down blacks and hang or lynch them in the south. Try doing some research before you go skipping to conclusions in your millennial worlds.  

I don't think that the shirt would be racist or a little kid would be considered racist singing that song unless they're actually using the word 'nigger'. It's not a white person's job to assume what black people get offended by and try and stop it, when often times black people aren't offended that easily.

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PC pussies

So damned worried about what someone MAY think they create a bunch of bs over nothing. besides, who cares. finish the saying. wear what you want. it's still a free country. f#@k sensorship

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That was a typical line said when white supremacists would hunt down blacks and hang or lynch them in the south. 

That's the problem word. It was a typical line said when white supremacists did some unsavory stuff to blacks. It was something sung during the days of slavery. It was racist and offensive to black people.

 

Society and time have changed the song so that it isn't racist anymore.

 

The shirt would only be offensive if the song is still racist, which it isn't.

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Of course they should pull the line. It doesn't even matter if it is racist, if people believe it to be racist selling it is very bad business. So pull the line, apologise and get the world to talk about primark, even if only for a day.

 

Is the phrase itself racist? If it included tiger, no. If it includes nigger, yes. If it is cut off before then it's questionable, but since it's a communication you can't really control it could be seen as racist, which any smart company would avoid. The guy who made the t-shirt probably honestly didn't think he was doing anything wrong and didn't intend to be racist. But by leaving it open and by including violent symbols on the t-shirt he certainly left the option of the racist association open.

That's the problem word. It was a typical line said when white supremacists did some unsavory stuff to blacks. It was something sung during the days of slavery. It was racist and offensive to black people.

 

Society and time have changed the song so that it isn't racist anymore.

 

The shirt would only be offensive if the song is still racist, which it isn't.

I'd agree if the tiger line was included, but without it and on a black t-shirt with a bloody bat it certainly invokes racist associations. I haven't seen walking dead and when I first saw this shirt on Facebook the only things it made me think of was white supremacists and the kkk

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Sigh.


A shirt can't be racist - because a shirt doesn't have an opinion.
A shirt however, can be offensive to people (a.k.a. people take offense to what it says)



You can ask the question:

  • Do you take offense to this t-shirt?
    .
    me? no - but I'm a white european who didn't know the racist variant of that shift
    .
  • Do you think other people could find that shirt offensive?
    .
    yes. Obviously. everyone who associates that rhyme with it's racist context could find offensive
    .
  • Do you think other people should find that shirt offensive?
    .
    Well ... ask all the people here who say that white PC SJW shouldn't say how black people feel.
    people are free to make up their own mind.
    .
  • Do you think it was ment to be offensive to people?
    .
    I don't think so.
    .
  • Did Primark do the right thing by removing them?
    .
    I dunno if it's the right thing - but it certainly isn't the wrong thing.
    It's their choice. It's bad for a company to sell tomething too many people take offsense to. (and lack of foresight, makes that 'could take offense to'). Where they draw the line is up to them.
    .

I haven't seen walking dead and when I first saw this shirt on Facebook the only things it made me think of was white supremacists and the kkk

 

I sure as heck wouldn't be surprised if they bought it for that very reason.
 

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On 3/6/2017 at 1:13 PM, Budi said:

It is very racist, the problem is none of you know it's racist because you weren't even born when shit like that was said. That was a typical line said when white supremacists would hunt down blacks and hang or lynch them in the south. Try doing some research before you go skipping to conclusions in your millennial worlds.  

You think this is a millennial thing, do you. The first documented use of this song with that word as a lyric was in 1906. Black lynchings faced a steep decline after the 1920s-1930s. You were alive for those? Please share your stories, I'd love to hear them. By the way, the rhyme was present in America in different forms before and after, dating back to 1815 in NYC. Huh, those couldn't have been millennials. And the original version of the rhyme dates back from a medieval heathen priest song, used to "beg(s) the highest goddess for an oracle while divining, an oracle that may decide about life and death of a human". Those could have been millennials, I guess. From the last millennium. To far back for you? Let's keep it real with some cultural usages of the phrase that non-millennials didn't get triggered by!

 

  • Eeny Meeny Miny Moe by the Dutch group Luv in 1979
  • "Eenie Meenie" by Jeffrey Osborne on self-titled 1982 album.
  • "Eenie, Meenie, Miney, Mo" by Danish pop group Toy-Box in 1999 from their first album "Fantastic."
  • The vinyl release of Radiohead's album OK Computer (1997) uses the words "eeny meeny miny moe" (rather than letter or numbers) on the labels of Sides A, B, C and D respectively.
  • Eenie Meenie Records is a Los Angeles–based independent record label founded in 1999.
  •  Notably, the rhyme has been used by killers to choose victims in the 1994 films Pulp Fiction and Natural Born Killers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eeny,_meeny,_miny,_moe

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynching_in_the_United_States

 

As a matter of fact, the only time the phrase has caused controversy and something was actually done about before this was in 1993. "A Milwaukee teacher "lost three days of pay, underwent racial sensitivity training, and had placed in her personnel file" along with a disciplinary pay cut". Guess why? She used the actual version with that word in it. Surprisingly, people only get offended when you use the racial slur version, not the long since unremarkable version we teach to our kids. Imagine that! 

My conclusion?

People are to sensitive today. Grow up. Next they'll be saying that whites deserve less rights. Oh wait. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Lives_Matter

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You were alive for those?

...

by the way, the rhyme was present in America in different forms before and after, dating back to 1815 in NYC

Interesting ... so ... people younger then 70 can't take offsense to cross burnings?

 

by the way, cross brunings were also around before the KKK. Somehow... that really doesn't matter, you know.

 

 

People who associate cross burning with the KKK consider it offensive.

People who associate it with something else ... might not.

 

 

And, considering, as you put it yourself, there are different connotations to that rhyme,

When it is used in a romantic song, opposite to adjacent a bloody bat, ... people might associate that differently.

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Calling it racist implies that the company selling the shirts specifically had the song with "nigger" in mind and decided to promote it through t-shirts disguised as a line from a tv show.

 

It doesn't make people ignorant of the song's origin just because they didn't think of it when they first saw the t-shirt. It's obviously marketed towards the fans of the show and Negan's lines where the first thing that popped in their mind, it's just that they didn't find it offensive like others.

 

At most this was just in poor taste, and they didn't consider that people who aren't aware of the show will find the reference out of context and with the bloodied baseball bat and all, it's not hard imagine how one could take offense to it.

 

That doesn't change the fact that the t shirt is obviously not racist and it was directed exclusively towards the fans of the show. Being racist and being offensive are two separate things.

 

I doubt the makers of the t-shirts would have much of a negative impact if they kept them on the store, considering the tv show has a pretty large audience and all the online calls for being racist would've probably be shut down by their fans.

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1. Interesting ... so ... people younger then 70 can't take offsense to cross burnings?

 

by the way, cross brunings were also around before the KKK. Somehow... that really doesn't matter, you know.

 

 

People who associate cross burning with the KKK consider it offensive.

People who associate it with something else ... might not.

 

 

And, considering, as you put it yourself, there are different connotations to that rhyme,

When it is used in a romantic song, opposite to adjacent a bloody bat, ... people might associate that differently.

1. I was addressing the laughable point that people that weren't born yet are oblivious to the implications.  I would agree on the matter that when it comes to offensive things, anybody CAN get offended.

2. AT THE SAME TIME, cross burning is a much different example as it seems it has ALWAYS held a negative connotation as compared to this song, and is not to a point where it is widely decommissioned in terms of offensiveness. The KKK still exists, and prior to the first inception of the idea being associated with the Klan (roughly 1905?) cross burning seems to have been used in protest of religious veneration (I would hazard a guess at this being directed at Christians, so somebody was liable to be upset there), and as Scottish clans utilizing it as a declaration of war? War is never really a tame thing, is it? 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross_burning

 

3. It is adjacent to a bloody bat, yes indeed. However, there are no implications behind it associated with race. The people in the referenced scene are not black, and the offensive version of the rhyme was not used in the scene. The creators of the shirt did not mean anything by it. So I will stand by my original point; that people are to sensitive today. It's silly to associate a violent picture and a tame version of a rhyme that hasn't had racist implications in nearly 90 years to violence against blacks; especially if you do 3 seconds of research to discover that the cultural reference implied also had nothing malicious behind it.

 

Although I suspect that anybody who is "offended" by this is just taking a political stand and aren't truly offended, I do wish anybody that actually IS offended by stuff like this luck in real life. Sure, you can go to a college that is a "safe space" and is so truly liberal to the point where you actually aren't allowed to use the word "man". But what are you going to do after that? The world is not a safe space. 

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2. AT THE SAME TIME, cross burning is a much different example as it seems it has ALWAYS held a negative connotation

I would disagree. Aside from the obvious terror attacks, a cross lighting, for instance, is a ceremony where a cross is set on fire, as depiction of ones faith. There's nothing negative about that.

 

 

 

But hey, OK, if you don't like cross brunings, how about swastikas?

 

Nice example of something that once had a postive connotation, yet now, you (propp with eveil

 

 

It is adjacent to a bloody bat, yes indeed. However, there are no implications behind it associated with race.

no, but there is the association with violence - which brings us to the same conclusion: If you take something that has a possible violent conotation, and put it in a position that it gets associated with violence -- that's the conotation people will see.

 

 

It's silly to associate a violent picture and a tame version of a rhyme

... yeah ... that's kind of hard to argue, seeing as association isn't some volentary act - it's a reflexive thing.

 

 

 

Lets look at your argument, shall we, and presume you bought a shirt with only a swastika (a straight one, not the 45° titled one the nazies use), bought on your trip from india.

 

3. It is adjacent to a nothing. there are no implications behind it associated with race. The people in the referenced scene are not jewish, and the offensive version of the swastika  was not used in the scene. The creators of the shirt did not mean anything by it.

As you can hopefully see ... your argument falls down into smithereens.

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It is adjacent to a bloody bat, yes indeed. However, there are no implications behind it associated with race.

no, but there is the association with violence - which brings us to the same conclusion: If you take something that has a possible violent conotation, and put it in a position that it gets associated with violence -- that's the conotation people will see.

 

It's silly to associate a violent picture and a tame version of a rhyme

... yeah ... that's kind of hard to argue, seeing as association isn't some volentary act - it's a reflexive thing.

 

2. AT THE SAME TIME, cross burning is a much different example as it seems it has ALWAYS held a negative connotation

I would disagree. Aside from the obvious terror attacks, a cross lighting, for instance, is a ceremony where a cross is set on fire, as depiction of ones faith. There's nothing negative about that.

 

But hey, OK, if you don't like cross brunings, how about swastikas? Nice example of something that once had a postive connotation (in lands liek india, japan, ...), yet now, you (as well as many others) associate ith nazis.

 

 

 

So, lets look at your argument, and presume you're walking down the street, in a shirt with only a swastika (a straight one, not the 45° titled one the nazies use), bought on your trip from india.

 

3. It is adjacent to a nothing. there are no implications behind it associated with race. The people in the referenced scene are not jewish, and the offensive version of the swastika  was not used in the scene. The creators of the shirt did not mean anything by it.

Is it just me ... or do all those points seem kind of irrelevent? A lot of people will obviously be offended by that shirt when you were it.

 

Not because they were alive during WW2

Not because they are jewish

Not because swastikas always had a negative connotation.

Not because the creator of that shirt was a nasi (as pointed out, he wasn't)

Not because it's the offenensive version of the symbol (again, it wasn't)

Not because neo nazis still use the symbol (I actually even sure they do, and I'm betting most people don't know either)

 

Because people reflexively associate what's on your shirt, with the nazis.

 

Right or wrong, Silly or smart, that has nothing to do with it. It's a brain thing.

 

They simply do.

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Nice example of something that once had a postive connotation

 

 

This is my problem with this argument. This doesn't work because it's the opposite way. The rhyme was once negative and is now positive/harmless. The swastika once had positive connotations and is now heavily negative worldwide (banned in many countries).  Additionally, this example does not work because the symbol has positive connotations in one culture but is despised in others. In fact, I'd like to cite this little tidbit from Wikipedia's article on the swastika.

 

Western misinterpretation of Asian use

 

At the end of 20th century, and early 21st century, confusion and controversy has occurred when consumer goods bearing the Buddhist symbol have been exported to North America, and mistakenly interpreted by Western consumers as a Nazi symbol.

When a ten-year-old boy in Lynbrook, New York, bought a set of Pokémon cards imported from Japan in 1999, two of the cards contained the left-facing Buddhist swastika. The boy's parents misinterpreted the symbol as a Nazi swastika, which is right-facing with 45 degree rotation, and filed a complaint to the manufacturer. Nintendo of America announced that the cards would be discontinued, explaining that what was acceptable in one culture was not necessarily so in another; their action was welcomed by the Anti-Defamation League who recognised that there was no intention to be offensive but said that international commerce meant that "isolating [the Swastika] in Asia would just create more problems".[139]

In 2002, Christmas crackers containing plastic toy red pandas sporting swastikas were pulled from shelves after complaints from consumers in Canada. The manufacturer, based in China, said the symbol was presented in a traditional sense and not as a reference to the Nazis, and apologized to the customers for the cross-cultural mixup.[140] In 2007, Spanish fashion chain Zara withdrew a handbag from its stores after a customer in Britain complained swastikas were embroidered on it. The bags were made by a supplier in India and inspired by commonly used Hindu symbols, which include the swastika.

 

 

The rhyme is in the context of one culture, therefore the argument of the swastika does not work. 

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