File this under Some folks just don’t get it.
From Yahoo!:
In this month’s Italian edition of the magazine, a trend story on hoop earrings bares the headline “Slave Earrings.” The text accompanying the image of a model wearing the circular jewelry reads: “If the name brings to the mind the decorative traditions of the women of colour who were brought to the southern United States during the slave trade, the latest interpretation is pure freedom.”
Were slave women really admired for their earrings and other “decorative traditions,” or was the main emphasis on how much back-breaking labor they could complete in a day? Hmm….
Editors tried to explain the “error” by claiming that they meant to use another term:
“We apologize for the inconvenience. It is a matter of really bad translation from Italian into English,” the magazine’s editor-in-chief Franca Sozzani said in a statement to press.”The Italian word, which defines those kind of earrings, should instead be translated into ‘ethnic style earrings’. Again, we are sorry about this mistake which we have just amended in the website.”
So they changed it on the website, and “slave earrings” became “ethnic earrings.” So slave and ethnic are interchangeable now?
They took the next step of deleting the piece entirely, saying, “We’ve decided to remove the article from the site to prove our good faith and to show it wasn’t our intention to insult anyone.”
It might have been wiser to make sure you weren’t insulting anyone by actually not insulting anyone. Just sayin’.