A boot being sold on Walmart Marketplace by a company named Harsuny featured the unfortunate letters “KKK” on each boot. It’s unclear why the boots featured those letters, which are infamously associated with the Klu Klux Klan, an American white supremacist and right-wing terrorist hate group that primarily targeted Black Americans following the American Civil War.
CAIR posted a screenshot of the since-removed boots to Twitter, thanking the company for dropping the “oddly/poorly named” boots.
“This item was listed by an outside third-party seller and removed because the item is inconsistent with our values and violates Walmart’s prohibited product policy,” a Walmart spokesperson said in a statement.”
“Like other major retailers, we operate an online marketplace that allows third-party sellers to offer merchandise to customers through our eCommerce platform. We have a process in place designed to prevent third party sellers from offering inappropriate items on our platform. Still, at times, inappropriate items make their way onto our platform.”
Walmart said they have reached out to the seller in order to “understand how this occurred” but that response is pending.
Walmart has removed several flagged items from its online store, but most recently a children’s toy remote which tells crude, adult-like humor, was shared by a TikTok user named Ashley Lynn, whose mother bought the toy for her 9-month-old child from Walmart as a Christmas gift.