Logically, H&M’s global success depends on global sales from a diverse customer base, including black people. As of August 2017, H&M only operated 172 physical stores in Sweden and Sweden was H&M’s sixth largest market in its 9 month report.

For 2017, H&M group planned to open approximately 475 new physical stores.

Today, the H&M group counts 161,000 employees in 43 online markets and more than 4,500 stores in 69 markets. In 2016, the H&M group achieved sales (including VAT) of SEK 223 billion and increased by 4 percent to 231 billion in 2017. Today’s H&M group is the second-largest global fashion retailer, not the 1947-founded, single womenswear store Hennes & Mauritz of Västerås, Sweden. To subject black people to dehumanizing stereotypes is racist. The H&M group has the size, resources and responsibility to be culturally aware of its diverse customer base and employees. After the 2015 mishap, one would expect H&M to remember its failure and learn from it, keeping tabs on its international markets’ cultural specificities. In 2016, a woman named Penny Sparrow faced criminal charges in South Africa for making use of the racist monkey stereotype towards black people. In South Africa, a country scarred by decades of Apartheid, H&M opened its first stores in 2015 and already showed racial insensitivity by casting only white models for their ad and by responding to lack of diversity criticism with implying that their ads were meant to “convey a positive image in its stores”. The monkey epithet has been used as recently as against the entire Obama family throughout Obama’s campaign and subsequent presidency, and against a slew of black football players by racist spectators ( Mario Balotelli and Dani Alves comes to mind).

Coupled with any number of other racist beliefs, the monkey stereotype has been used throughout the world to justify everything from slavery, lynchings and experimental medical practices to discrimination in housing, education, healthcare and employment for those of the African Diaspora. The monkey comparison serves to dehumanize black people in contrast to the righteous, intelligent or otherwise superior white human. The images we get from googling black people as monkeys makes us ill. Monkey stereotypes still terrorize black people today.Ĭomparing black people to monkeys is a stereotype dating back to the earliest encounters of Europeans with people of the African continent. H&M’s advertisement was unequivocally racist.ĭehumanizing stereotypes, such as black people as monkeys, are racist and not part of a far away history.

Racism h and m ad