Another day, another person using a “monkey” reference and acting like they didn’t know it was racially offensive. via Huffington Following cries of racism, South Korea’s largest tobacco company is pulling an advertisement for its new “This Africa” cigarettes. The KT&G ads featuring a monkey dressed as a human were launched a month ago to promote the brand’s new “This Africa” cigarettes, according to the Agence France-Presse. The ads to promote cigarettes dried and roasted in “traditional” African style showed monkeys dressed as humans, tagged with the slogan “Africa is coming!” Zambian Mirriam Simasiku, an African woman living in Seoul, told the Korea Times she found the ads extremely offensive. “According to those images, Africans are just a bunch of uneducated monkeys,” she told the publication. “We as Africans are still a minority against a multitude of pure Koreans with no law to protect us. By the way, it is named This Africa, which is inappropriate since no one thought of making any connection.” These companies are getting out of control with this “Oh, we didn’t know” mess. Riiiiiigggghhht. SMH.
