Last week, H&M was forced to apologize and order a withdrawal of stock after publishing an advertisement that featured a black young black male wearing a green hoodie with a caption saying coolest monkey in the jungle.”

According to Fox News, protesters vandalized H&M’s stores in South Africa and demanded the Swedish brand to stop selling the product. The violence spread to at least four malls. Mannequins and racks of clothes were scattered all over the place as vandals attacked the store. After police successfully removed the protesters, the  Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), a South African revolutionary socialist political party, praised the violence, saying the retailer was “facing the consequences for its racism.”   EFF leader Julius Malema said stores were targeted “because they called our children baboons.”

Fox News reported that the mother of the boy in the advertisement, Terry Mango, did not see an issue with the image of her son, and defended H&M telling  critics to get over it.

. According to The Sun, Malema told a rally: “We are teaching them a lesson, we are not going to allow anyone to use the colour of our skin to humiliate us, or to exclude us. We are black and we are proud. We are black and we are beautiful. We are black and we are not ashamed of being black.”

This incident proves that more needs to be done within the marketing teams so these mistakes don’t happen again. They need more people of color to say “no don’t do this, this is a bad look.” If H&M knew they were going to have all of this uproar and celebrities backing out and not working with them anymore, they wouldn’t have done it, but let’s hope they learn from it.