How the fuck does this stuff keep happening? I mean Jesus who at this point can’t identify that as just a bad bad idea.
H&M is Swedish, right? I'd guess that the marketing executives and whoever reviews this stuff makes these decisions at the top have either never really seen a black person or more likely, really is quite unaware of the cultural history of this kind of imagery in the US and elsewhere. We've got 260+ years of this history. Their exposure to non-whites really is
comparatively recent for Scandinavian countries and it is still a rarity--but more so exposure to what are predominantly muslim immigrants on their part, doesn't impart any kind of reference to this stuff.
It kind of reminds me of Japan and their "Nazi Donuts" shops and "Hitler barbershop" or whatever. Grabbing cultural references outside of theirs as a marketing gimmick, sort of because of the sensitivity, but also blithely unaware or even indifferent of the actual harm that this has caused.