How Do We Reimburse Harriet Tubman For This Swipe At Her Reputation?

While Har­ri­et Tub­man stood for the free­dom of slaves, the Under­ground Rail­road con­duc­tor DID NOT stand with a fist. One­U­nit­ed Bank’s new deb­it card with Tubman’s hands in a Wakan­da fist, has many of us won­der­ing what kind of mess is this? 

To be fair, what mod­ern cul­ture now defines as the Wakan­da arms is actu­al­ly the sign for love in Amer­i­can Sign Lan­guage. How­ev­er, the buzz on social is that there is no love here. In fact, many chirpers on Twit­ter have asked One­U­nit­ed Bank to halt fur­ther pro­mo­tion and use of the card. 

And unfor­tu­nate­ly this is isn’t a mis­read by a non-mul­ti­cul­tur­al brand mak­ing a wrong mul­ti­cul­tur­al brand­ing state­ment (think the infa­mous black boy in mon­key hood­ie by H&M), One­U­nit­ed Bank is reput­ed to be the largest black owned bank. Fur­ther­more, cel­e­brat­ed African-Amer­i­can artist Addo­nis Park­er was com­mis­sioned to cre­ate the art­work. 

So in the case of “Har­ri­et Tub­man” vs “Har­ri­et Tub­man Appre­ci­a­tion Gone Wrong”, the ver­dict is that not all ideas that sound good on can­vas, work well on deb­it card. #swipethat

Blogged By: Malia Dawkins