The Playmobil toy company has claimed a dark-skinned figure wearing a neck shackle was meant to “represent a pirate who was a former slave in a historical context” after a mother complained that it was racist.
Ida Lockett of Sacramento, California, was horrified when she saw the instructions to her five-year-old son’s Playmobil pirate ship, which she said showed a slave with a neckpiece that looked similar to a slave collar.
The character, appearing to be dark-skinned, with black hair, no shoes and tattered pants, came with instructions to put a grey choker-like piece around its neck.
“This right here was found on his neck,” Lockett said.
“You cannot have this specific accessory and call it anything else,” Lockett said. “The fact that you can Google it, look it up, say what it is – it’s a slave collar.
“He was excited when he got it,” she said. “I spent the weekend putting it together.”
“It’s definitely racist,” she told local CBS TV. “It told my son to put a slave cuff around the black character’s neck, and then to play with the toy.”
“It’s a racist piece. It’s a racist toy,” she said.
Playmobil said that the toy was intended to portray life on a 17th-century pirate ship.
In a statement to the Washington Post, the company said: “If you look at the box, you can see that the pirate figure is clearly a crew member on the pirate ship and not a captive.
“The figure was meant to represent a pirate who was a former slave in a historical context. It was not our intention to offend anyone in anyway.”
The toy pirate ship, given to the five-year-old as a birthday present, comes with several figurines and also what Lockett describes as a “dungeon”, and can be found for around $90 at Toys ‘R’ Us, the large toy store.
Aimee Norman, the aunt who gave the toy set, posted a photo of the figurine and wrote on the Playmobil USA Facebook page she was: “MORTIFIED to have recently bought” the pirate ship set for her nephew, “only to hear that when assembling it, they found that its assembly instructions indicate to add the neck cuff/shackle to the black character’s neck”.
“WOW,” she wrote. “Would it be too much to ask for you to just create a regular old black pirate?”
“Newsflash, Playmobil: this is the 21st century. People of African descent have contributed to mankind in a myriad of ways that existed outside of the disgusting institution of the slave trade. Selling children’s toys that are suggestive of slavery in play is obscene, even moreso given the marked absence of diversity in your entire toy line.”
Norman added: “#Slavery.is.not.a.game.”
Stephen Webb, the president of the Sacramento branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), has since demanded action to be taken. “This is deplorable. This cannot be accepted, and it needs to be pulled off the shelf,” he told CBS Sacramento.
The Guardian has emailed Toys ‘R’ Us and Playmobil, who have yet to respond.
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