The NBA's Sacramento Kings planned to give away a Lunar New Year-themed T-shirt during its game against the Milwaukee Bucks on Monday night. However, members of the Kings organization, including team center DeMarcus Cousins, found the T-shirt to be racially insensitive for the first day of Black History Month, and the team subsequently pulled the giveaway.
The black shirts featured a purple monkey representing the Chinese Year of the Monkey, which begins Feb. 8 on the Chinese calendar. While there is a league-wide initiative to celebrate the Chinese New Year, according to ESPN, the Kings' staff agreed the T-shirts were racially insensitive in the light of Black History Month.
Kings President Chris Granger said to The Sacramento Bee:
"We all need a lesson in sensitivity. In an effort to celebrate Chinese New Year, we had some concerns about the T-shirt giveaway, so we pulled them all before the doors opened. Certainly we don't want to offend anybody, and we acted as soon as we heard the concern."
While the T-shirts weren't distributed, the rest of the Chinese New Year celebrations continued.
Hannah Abrams is the senior content editor for Promo Marketing. In her free time, she enjoys coming up with excuses to avoid exercise, visiting her hometown in Los Angeles and rallying for Leonardo DiCaprio to win his first second Academy Award.