Walmart has issued a statement after the company was criticized for selling a t-shirt and hoodie on its website that featured a graphic resembling a Nazi salute.
The t-shirt and hoodie featured a graphic that read “Paper Beats Rock,” with a raised flat palm towering over a clenched fist. After facing some criticism for the merch, the company issued an apology for hosting the third-party seller that produced the merch, per TMZ.
The two pieces have since been removed from the Walmart website.
“We have zero tolerance for any prohibited or offensive products appearing on our marketplace,” the statement read. “The items in question were listed by a third-party seller and have been removed from our site for violating our prohibited products policy. When issues like this are identified, we act immediately to remove them and strengthen our systems to prevent a recurrence. The trust of our customers and the integrity of our platform remain paramount.”
Worse yet, the clenched fist symbol also featured in the graphic could be construed as another political symbol. As the Political Symbols database claims, the raised fist has been associated with countless political positions, and it has also been used to represent Black pride.
The symbol was first established in France in the 1800s, per Honoré Daumier’s The Uprising, and has since been associated with left-leaning political positions, including Communists in Germany in opposition to the Nazi Party.
In fact, the raised flat palm Nazi salute, often referred to as the “Roman salute” or the fascist salute, has been read as a response to the raised fist. Elon Musk came under fire for doing the same salute earlier this year.
This isn’t the first time Walmart has faced criticism for hosting such t-shirts. As reported by Rolling Stone last year, Walmart removed two t-shirts from its website that featured graphics from the infamous white-power group Skrewdriver. Like the “Paper Beats Rock” merch, those items were also sold by third-party retailers on the website.