The Los Angeles chapter of the NAACP last week forced Hallmark to pull from its shelves a graduation card the civil rights group deemed racist.
"Printed on the card, is dialogue such as, 'Watch out, Saturn, this grad is gonna run rings around you!'" reported the Orange County Register on June 3.
"And on the audio chip that plays once the card is opened, [characters] Hoops and Yoyo continue their riffing on all the things new graduates are going to do once they get out there to take on the universe...'And you black holes -- you're so ominous! And you planets? Watch your back!'"
But as KABC-TV reported, folks at the NAACP hear the words "black whores" (video follows with additional quotes from the OC Register and commentary, h/t Hot Air headlines):
Sounds like an innocent enough reference to that peculiar feature of the solar system known as a black hole to us. But members of the NAACP hear it differently, saying the high-pitched voice of Hoops -- or Yoyo, we still can't keep 'em straight -- says "black whores" and is a racist slur against African-American women.
Hallmark's response to KABC was to defend the card -- which has been sold for three years now with no complaints -- as not being racist at all, but then to go ahead and pull it from all its stores anyway.
Imagine that.
The card has been around for three years, has a planetary theme addressing a common astronomical term "black holes," but because some people hear the word "whores," it has to be pulled -- in the same week America's media lined up to support Helen Thomas despite her anti-Semitic remarks to a rabbi.
Sure is an interesting world we live in today.
