Ida Lockett of Sacramento, CA was helping her 5-year-old son put together a Playmobil pirate ship kit he’d been given for his birthday when she saw that the instructions told her to put a shackle around the neck of a dark-skinned figurine in torn clothing.
The boy’s aunt wrote on Playmobil’s Facebook page that 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.”
From the Washington Post:
Playmobil said in a statement to The Washington Post that the toy was intended to portray life on a 17th-century pirate ship.
“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,” according to the statement. “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 any way.”
Related: Tanya Schevitz’s Boing Boing feature on Playmobil’s odd history of political correctness, or incorrectness.
(Thanks, Matthew!)