A mother in Sacramento, CA, was upset to discover her son's new toy features what seem to be racist instructions. The toy is a Playmobil pirate-ship set that comes with a dark-skinned figurine. The instructions tell users to place on the character a plastic neck piece — which the mother believes is a slave collar.
The woman, Ida Lockett, told CBS Sacramento, “You cannot have this specific accessory and call it anything else. The fact that you can Google it, look it up, say what it is — it’s a slave collar.”
She went on to put it simply, "It's a racist piece, it's a racist toy."
A Playmobil representative told Refinery29, "This piece is from a Playmobil pirate playset that is designed to depict life on a 17th-century pirate ship on the high seas. 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 any way."
How kids are supposed to differentiate between "a former slave" and a current one is a little hard to say.