Amazon recently came under fire after a seller described a pair of brown shoes using a racial slur. The color of the shoes were described as “N*gger-Brown.”
David Lammy, a British politician, found the listing while searching for a new pair of shoes on Amazon. He uploaded a screenshot of the shoes to Twitter and asked the company to take it down. “Just buying brown brogues tonight leads to this racist microaggression,” he tweeted. “Is it 2020 or 1720? Please @amazon take it down.”
The listing was quickly removed from the site, following Lammy’s tweet. It’s not clear whether the shoes were sold through a third-party reseller or from Amazon itself. The politician took to Twitter to thank the company for taking the shoe down, but claims this isn’t the first time a racial slur was used to describe items on the site.
“Thank you @amazon for taking this down now, but given the item has been on sale since March, what systems do you have in place for reviewing descriptions and not allowing offensive terms to be posted in the first place?” he wrote in a following tweet. “This is not the first time.”
An Amazon spokesperson released a statement saying, “All sellers must follow our selling guidelines and those who do not will be subject to action including potential removal of their account. The product in question is no longer available.”
Last year, Amazon pulled over a dozen products that were considered offensive to Muslims. In December, multiple Christmas ornaments were removed from the site for featuring images of Auschwitz concentration camps.
Back in June, Amazon pulled a children’s shirt which depicted an image of the killing of George Floyd. The $14.99 T-shirt was listed as “state of the art” and “great for casual” occasions and showed former officer Derek Chauvin with his knee on Floyd’s neck.
Take a look at the brown shoe listing below.