Playmobil, the German toy company celebrating its 40th anniversary this year, has come under criticism after a Californian mother notices that one of the characters in a pirate ship set is a “dark-skinned figure wearing a slave collar.”
Ida Lockett, whose five-year-old son received the pirate set as a birthday gift, was assembling the toys when she noticed in the instructions that the character was to have a neck shackle placed on it.
“This right here was found on his neck,” Lockett said.
“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.”
Playmobil’s instruction manual shows that children assembling the figures are recommended to slide the silver collar around his neck, which is an accessort to his tattered clothes. The ship, a product which has existed for more than a decade, also includes a dungeon space.
The directions in the instruction manual
“It’s definitely racist,” Lockett told TV news reporters. “It told my son to put a slave cuff around the black character’s neck, and then to play with the toy.”
Responding to the criticism to the Washington Post, a Playmobil spokesperson said that the pirate set was intended to reflect life on the open seas on a pirate vessel in the 17th century.
“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,” a statement said. “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 anyway.”
Aimee Norman, the aunt who gave the set to her nephews as a present, wrote on the Playmobil USA Facebook page that she was “MORTIFIED to have recently bought” the pirate ship set for her him, “only to hear that when assembling it, they found that its assembly instructions indicate to add the neck cuff/shackle to the black character’s neck.”
“WOW,” she wrote. “Would it be too much to ask for you to just create a regular old black pirate?"
But responding to her post, several members of the public have said Norman's reaction is excessive.
"Toss out the neck 'ring' or whatever it is and move on. Pirates took prisoners. It's a historical fact. Make the guy a pirate if you don't want him to be a prisoner," replied one person.
