With St. Patricks Day coming up, stores are selling green clothes with slogans that celebrate Irish culture like "kiss me, I'm Irish" and "hug me for luck." Then there's this shirt Mic found on PubCrawls.com, a company that organizes pub crawls. Apparently, someone thought it would be funny to co-opt the Black Lives Matter movement to encourage drinking.
The shirt reads "drunk lives matter" and features the same kind of font as BLM shirts, except there's a green background instead of a black one and a clover in the middle of the R in "drunk."
Making Black Lives Matter into a joke trivializes the very serious issues it arose from, like the fact that Black Americans have triple the chances white Americans have of being killed by police and racism is hurting Americans' physical and mental health. It also trivializes the tireless work Black Lives Matter activists have done to fight racism and make our country safer.
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Drunk LIves Matter!
— Quick Print Tees (@QuickPrintTees) March 10, 2017
Order today to receive in time for St. Patrick's Day.https://t.co/3u5A2w3FU3 pic.twitter.com/ZO6QD9rnNT
The shirt's also being sold in multiple colors on Amazon, where reviewers are calling out its tone-deafness. "As an African American I CAN NOT give this any stars but I'm forced to give it one!" one wrote. "You are selling shirts that make fun of a slogan that has come out of the brutal killings of an entire race of people!!!"
"This is extremely racist. Amazon, you should remove this immediately. There is nothing funny about the murder of black people," said another.
"WAIT!!! What?! Drunk college students puking on the street are being murdered disproportionately or incarcerated at much higher rates than non drunk idiots??!!!" one joked. "I never knew! Oh wait this is supposed to be funny? My bad. In that case it's disgusting."
Some have seen people wearing the shirts IRL and had similar reactions.
Dude in bright green shamrock laden "drunk lives matter" shirt is lucky he didn't go in a porta potty so i could knock it over onto the door
— SüßwasserLeah (@suesswassersee) March 13, 2017
This girl has a shirt that says "drunk lives matter" I find that so offensive...
— britt (@ttribsx) March 12, 2017
There's a guy in a green Drunk Lives Matter shirt. It's 5:30pm and I'm trying not to punch him. Happy Parade Day.
— Mary Mac (@Maryoake) March 11, 2017
i gave up on St. Patrick's Day last year after seeing a band of idiots all in "Drunk Lives Matter" t-shirts
— jutt (@juttinthacut) March 11, 2017
Needless to say, if you want to dress up in the theme of St. Paddy's Day, a pretty green clover on your shirt may be the way to go.