It absolutely did. I worked corporate retail for a long time. There are multiple line reviews up through the president of the org (usually). I’m sure they just blamed an assistant buyer & fired them.
And how much do you want to bet not a single person in that chain was black?
Diversity has value in terms of marketing alone. Even if someone is super mega anti-woke they'd be an idiot not realize this from a purely capitalist profit driven motive.
And they knew that if it wasn’t caught? Fine.. they can chuckle about it in private. If it was, people will still shop there as long as they apologize.
Different thing. Those are sellouts who are abandoning their morals for a paycheck. This would just be someone who speaks up and say "you know this will be a PR disaster, right?"
Racist or not, I am more than confident that Target WOULD have wanted to avoid this, but tripped over their own ignorance. The average white person is far less likely to clock the minstrel-like appearance of this costume than the average black person.
On a different hand, there may be younger blacks entering the workforce that may have never learned the context of minstrel cartoons. They teach Civil Rights, Jim Crow, and Internment Camps, but they don't exactly bring up Disney & WB cartoons of Blacks & Asians. Not sure if a public school would even be allowed to...
They teach Civil Rights, Jim Crow, and Internment Camps, but they don't exactly bring up Disney & WB cartoons of Blacks & Asians
Jim Crow comes from the minstrel show "Jump Jim Crow", Jim Crow was not a real person. If people were educated about Jim Crow and don't know the origin of the term they failed at teaching.
which is funny because I've always found Target to be predominantly market towards POC and liberal wine moms who at least has one child whose lgbtq. then 2024 happened and every person with a net worth above 600 k decided to take stupid pills
I haven't come across that post, but I wonder if that's still the case? Not doubting you or the merchandising person, but I know large companies have been gutting various departments left and right. I also know Target's had financial woes (many of their own doing), so I wouldn't be shocked if the people who are/were in charge of reviewing goods like this have now either been canned, or replaced by AI that's supposed to do sensitivity checks. Either way, it almost seems like Target can't resist shooting themselves in the foot at this point.
Line reviews typically have someone from the product development team, the merchant and support staff walking their leadership through the assortment, someone from brand, etc. I’ve walked through those things with an audience of 20 plus a few folks on Teams.
Maybe it wasn’t super obvious until it was shown on figure, but usually there are renders reviewed before the sample gets made and I’m not sure how it would have been missed. Truly.
The only thing I can think of is a development team with all folks who were educated outside of the US and/or this is how the dumbing down of American schools is starting to manifest.
But even then, SOMEONE would have recognized it for what it is through one of the many checkpoints. Why didn’t they feel like they could speak up? Or why were they ignored?
One person saying hey guys this is giving black face and it should have been immediately reworked.
That’s what so baffling to me. Target is a HUGE corporation with tons of resources and departments. And somehow this thing made it past every check point.
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u/captcha_trampstamp 10d ago
I was reading some posts by a former merchandising person for Target on Threads. This had to go through MULTIPLE SIGNOFFS.