By Sheryl Estrada
A photo of the former slave figurine and instructions from Playmobil pirate ship set. Photo from Facebook.
Playmobil, a popular toy brand, has been under fire for a figurine in a pirate ship set. The toy is dark skinned, and the instruction guide tells the user to put a shackle around its neck.
Ida Lockett of Sacramento, California,brought the toy to the public’s attention last week on social media. She said her 5-year-old son received aPlaymobil pirate ship set toy witha figurine that resembles a slave wearing a neck shackle as a birthday present from his aunt, Aimee Norman. Shepurchased it from Toys “R” Us.
When assembling the toy, Lockett discovered adark-skinned figurine with black hair, no shoes and ragged pants. The instruction manual calls for the gray choker-like piece to be snapped in place around its neck.
“You cannot have this specific accessory and call it anything else,” Lockett said in an interview with CBS Sacramento. “The fact that you can Google it, look it up, say what it is it’s a slave collar. It’s definitely racist. It told my son to put a slave cuff around the black character’s neck, and then to play with the toy.”
On Playmobil’s Facebook page, Norman posted she is “mortified” she purchased Pirate Ship Set 5135 and that “assembly instructions indicate to add the neck cuff/shackle to the black character’s neck.”
She continued, “I suppose it’s optional as to whether a kid chooses to then place said character into chains or into a prison cell at the bottom of the ship. When I was browsing your play sets for purchase, this was the only one that even had a black character and that’s precisely why I chose it for my nephew. I didn’t notice from the box exterior that the black characters were to be depicted in this offensive way. Who would think in the year 2015”
Playmobil is a line of toys produced by Brandsttter Stiftung & Co.KG, which is headquartered in Germany. The company said the set depicts a 17th century pirate ship and said the following ina statement:
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.
Sacramento NAACP President Stephen Webb is also displeased.
“This is deplorable,” he said in an interview. “This cannot be accepted, and it needs to be pulled off the shelf.”
The toy set is currently still available for purchase.
Slavery in Video Games
At the end of August, when Serious Games Interactive released “Playing History 2: Slave Trade” on Steam, an online distribution platform for video games, it quickly caught the public’s attention and Twitter users in the U.S. expressed outrage.
The “educational” video game depicts the 18th-century slave trade included a mini game, “Slave Tetris,” in which one had to stack Black slaves in a ship to win points, like Tetris the puzzle video game from the ’80s.
The game, launched in 2013, aimed to teach children ages 11 to 14 aboutslaveryand the Middle Passage. For the majority of the game, the user plays as a young slave steward named Putij, working on a ship that crosses the Atlantic Ocean.
Due to the backlash the video game developer, based in Copenhagen, Denmark, removed the “Slave Tetris” portion.
The CEO of Serious Games Simon Egenfeldt-Nielsen wrote in an online response, “I definitely agree it is insensitive and gruesome. It has to be like this to show what was done to load slave ships.The reactions people have to this game is something they will never forget, and they will remember just how inhumane slave trade was.”
These children’s products, created by European companies and distributed in the U.S., have opened the debate of whether or not toys and video games are proper avenues to teach kids about thehistory of slavery.
