"The Walking Dead" had once again caused an uproar, and this time it's not over onscreen gore or a shocking character death. A "Walking Dead" T-shirt has been removed from a U.K. department store after when the customers started complaining that it was "racist" and "fantastically offensive."
The T-shirt in the red zone had the image of a baseball bat as well as a message "Eeny Meeny Miny Moe" which reminds the scene from the AMC zombie drama in which the villain character Negan played by Jeffrey Dean Morgan decides to kill off a character in the show's Season 6 finale. However, when the slogan seemed like an innocent TV reference, the public quickly pointed out the racist origins of the phrase.
The origin of "Eeny, meeny, miny, moe" is from one old children's rhyme, having several versions. "Catch a tiger by its toe" is the line that follows when the initial versions saw the word "tiger" substituted with a racial slur. According to MSN, the use of this historical quote made a customer Ian Lucraft and his wife "shocked" when they saw the T-shirt in stores and complained to Primark.
Lucraft told the Warwick Courier that it was fantastically offensive, and he can only assume that no one in the process of ordering it knew what they were actually doing. He also added that it was directly threatening of a racist assault, and if he was black and faced by a wearer he would know just where he stood. Lucraft said that he fired off a letter to Primark chief executive Paul Marchant mentioning the incident as well as the after effects and asked Marchant to prevent bad publicity as well as don't offend other shoppers once he returned home from the department store.
A Primark spokesperson apologized for the shirt, saying that any offense that the shirt caused was not intentional. He also added the shirt has been withdrawn from the sale. Jeffrey Dean Morgan, who played Negan, tweeted against this controversy and his words were 'Holy crap people are stupid' beside a link to the story.
