On December 18, 2018, in a now swiftly-deleted tweet, Forever 21 thought it was a splendiferous idea to place a Great Value version of Eminem in a Wakanda Forever sweater.
The Fair Isle-style sweater features the fairest of them all—and it can be yours, if you’re willing to waste $34.90 of your hard-earned money. But be forewarned: Buying this garment is the equivalent of not forwarding those chain emails from 2005. You’ll be cursed.
Wakanda people does Forever21 have on their marketing team? Who at their company looked at this image and thought it was a good idea to put T’Chad in this garment? It seems they’re telling us Wakanda is Forever, but common sense is not.
The irony of placing a colonizer in a Black Panther-themed sweater isn’t lost on me, and definitely wasn’t lost on social media. (Editor’s note: T’Chad doesn’t look entirely sold on the idea, either—or maybe he just has dead eyes.)
I’m pretty sure T’Chad has strong plans of gentrifying Wakanda, one Starbucks at a time. But while T’Chad is comfortably rocking his colonizing couture, we want you to remember this one fact:
Updated Wednesday, December 19, 2018 at 3:45 EST:
It’s a tale as old as time: A brand does something stupid, we get mad, they apologize, and we move on with our lives. Forever21 must have realized that no one was really checking for them this holiday season and decided to put T’Chad in a Wakanda Forever Sweater to get attention, and after pissing off the delegation of blacks, they issued some half-assed apology to atone for their actions that went something like this:
Forever 21 takes feedback on our products and marketing extremely seriously. We celebrate all superheroes with many different models of various ethnicities and apologize if the photo in question was offensive in anyway.
Translation:
We didn’t hire enough black people, thus we weren’t aware that we fucked up, and now that we know we fucked up, then we’re kinda, sorta, possibly sorry. This is what happens when you bring colonizers to the cookout, hence why that shit is cancelled.