Posted on 09/25/2007 5:46:20 AM PDT by TornadoAlley3
Teacher declares doll hanging from noose in Watchung is racist:
WATCHUNG — The owner of a Halloween costume store here said a window display depicting a man hanging from a noose will be removed after a Scotch Plains woman complained, saying it was appalling and racist.
Delores Jackson, a fifth-grade teacher at the Charles H. Skillman Elementary School in Plainfield, said the display she saw Sunday in the window at the Halloween Scene store in the Blue Star Shopping Center on Route 22 West depicted a stuffed doll resembling a black man, wearing a labor suit and hanging from a noose.
"They are selling this particular display like spiders hanging from the ceiling. . . . I took offense by a black man being hung in a display window," Jackson said.
Jackson and her son, J.J. Jackson, 24, entered the store after seeing the display and asked a clerk about it. The inflatable "hanging victim" costume is manufactured by California-based First Imperial Trading Company, and resembles a "decaying person," said Robert Lap, store operator.
The costume often is used at haunted houses to create a "special graveyard effect," a store employee said Monday.
Lap said the display is nothing more than a "Halloween prop," and that Jackson was the only person in Halloween Scene's 30 stores in New York and New Jersey to complain about it.
How people perceive the display is "in the eye of the beholder," he said.
"Honestly, I didn't think of it (being racist in nature) until it was brought to me yesterday," Lap said. "I know myself; I am not a racist. It's simply a Halloween prop."
Lap confirmed later Monday that it would be removed from all Halloween Scene stores.
"(We're removing it) for obvious reasons," he said.
A media representative for First Imperial Trading Company said Monday that the company manufactures about 800 Halloween items and was unsure about the "hanging victim" display.
Jackson said she was especially concerned about the display appearing just days after civil-rights concerns in Louisiana over the Jena Six.
Jena Six refers to a group of six black teenagers who were accused in the Dec. 4, 2006, beating of a white teenager in Jena, La. They were arrested and charged with felonies. The white teenager was said to have taunted the black students previously with racial slurs, and nooses were hung from a tree in front of the students' high school.
"It's advertising that this (mocking a hanging) is OK," Jackson said.
She also was concerned about the display's proximity to a neighboring store that sells school supplies to parents, teachers and children.
Monday's incident represented another local concern about perceptions of racism. Last week, Assemblyman Jerry Green, D-Plainfield, asked the Union County Prosecutor's Office to investigate what a Plainfield man said was a racial epithet printed on a receipt for a cell phone that was bought at a Plainfield store.
When city resident Nykii Southerland, 27, went to the U.S. 1 Wireless store at 102 W. Front St., the phrase "good morning MY NIGGAS U.S. 1 HOLLA BAK" appeared on his receipt next to an otherwise unspecified charge for $25.
Victor Vaibak, owner of the U.S. 1 Wireless store, said Monday that the clerk who printed the phrase on the receipt has been fired.
"It really freaked me out. I lost my mind when I heard this," Vaibak said. "I feel very bad. This is not the way we run business. I want to apologize deeply to the guy, that's all I can say."
Blacks the permanent victims.
We should just go ahead and outlaw Halloween, Westerns, History & rope.
What the libs would call "highly diverse".
Some people have no other purpose in life than to stir up $#&@.
I suspect it will not be long before there’s a cry from the victim crowd to change the name of the Neuse River in S.E. NC.
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