A controversial new line of Abercrombie & Fitch T-shirts bearing stereotypical slogans and images of Asian Americans has incited a public outcry from Asian American communities on college campuses nationwide.
The T-shirts depict caricatures with slanted eyes, conical hats and slogans such as “Wong Brothers Laundry Service: Two Wongs Can Make It White.” Another features an image of the Buddha along with the slogan, “Buddha Bash — Get Your Buddha On the Floor.”
The shirts have met with protest by Asian American student organizations at schools from San Francisco to Boston, even after the T-shirts were pulled from store shelves and the company’s Web site Thursday after Abercrombie received a flood of complaints.
On Thursday, the San Jose Mercury News reported that Abercrombie & Fitch received about 60 telephone complaints Wednesday, many of them from Stanford students.
Later that day, the company announced it would pull the T-shirts from all of its 300-plus stores — just one week after they first went on sale. All but one T-shirt have been pulled from the Web site.
Protesters say the images perpetuate stereotypes and racist depictions of Asians. National Asian advocacy groups as well as college students responded soon after the first shirts arrived on the shelves last week, flooding Abercrombie & Fitch with angry calls and boycotting some West Coast stores.

On Thursday more than 20 Stanford students participated in a rally in front of the Abercrombie & Fitch store in San Francisco, organized by the Chinatown Community Development Center. About 200 people were present.
Coordinated efforts among Asian student groups from several colleges resulted in protests Saturday in front of company stores in Cambridge, Mass., San Francisco, Providence, R.I., and Ohio, where the company is based.
An Asian student group at Columbia University Law School spearheaded a national boycott of Abercrombie last weekend and held a drive to collect company products to return.
Though the company already has recalled the shirts and apologized to the public, many Asian American groups plan to continue protests.

Bethany Li, a junior majoring in history at Amherst College in Massachusetts, has been organizing coordinated protests in San Francisco, Ohio and Boston through NAASCon, the National Asian American Students Conference.
NAASCon kicked off its National Student Week of Action on Saturday and is planning rallies for the rest of this week in cities across the country. The organization originally had planned a National Student Day of Action, but expanded it to a week and planned rallies in response to the shirts.
When Li and her organization first learned of the shirts, they were shocked, she said.
“Of course, the immediate reaction was outrage,” she said. “What was Abercrombie thinking?”
Li said she hopes the National Student Week of Action will promote awareness and encourage offended consumers to boycott the offending retailer.
Abercrombie & Fitch, however, has maintained that the shirt designs were not meant to be taken seriously.
In an official statement, Abercrombie & Fitch responded to the situation by saying, “It is not and never has been our intention to offend anyone.”
Abercrombie spokesman Hampton Carney said the logo T-shirts were designed with “the sole purpose of adding humor and levity to our fashion line,” and added that other shirts also poke fun at taxi drivers, Britons and foreign waitresses.
“We thought everyone would love them, especially the Asian community,” he told Reuters.
Carney also told the Associated Press that the company is “very, very, very sorry.”
The controversy has created a demand for the T-shirts among some consumers. Though no longer available in stores, the shirts have since resurfaced on ebay.com, where recent bids have exceeded $200.
This is not the first time that the marketing of Abercrombie & Fitch, a casual clothing store, has been widely criticized. Catalogues featuring semi-nude models have also sparked controversy. And in 1998, a catalog spread featuring alcoholic drink recipes drew the ire of Mothers Against Drunk Driving. Just a few months ago, the company came under criticism from Christian and women’s rights groups for featuring overly suggestive poses in its advertisements.

— From U-WIRE reports