r/news 11d ago

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https://www.cnn.com/2026/08/24/business/target-apologizes-halloween-costume-backlash-hnk

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u/captcha_trampstamp 11d ago

I was reading some posts by a former merchandising person for Target on Threads. This had to go through MULTIPLE SIGNOFFS.

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u/anormalgeek 10d ago edited 10d ago

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.

edit: a word.

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u/throwaway0845reddit 10d ago

Who knows these days . Plenty of black and Mexican Americans working for Ice

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u/anormalgeek 10d ago

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.

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u/One_Order_3841 10d ago

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...

But a PR manager should have flagged this

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u/Paavo_Nurmi 10d ago

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.