CafePress Removes Anti-Mexican Products Page

How quickly things change when good people speak up.

Yesterday NewsTaco brought to light the repulsive products and racist anti-Mexican products that were being sold through CafePress. A group that calls itself Veer to the Right was selling all manner of t-shirts and bumper stickers and mugs with racist slogans emblazoned across a total of 22,200 products, as the listing of the website proclaimed.

Well, whoever was listening  and in charge of such things at CafePress took a second look and decided that the anti-Mexican merchandise was uncouth. Late yesterday I received an email from a CafePress spokesperson, directly from Park Avenue in New York. He apologized that the message didn’t get to me sooner. This is the text of the CafePress statement:

As you may know, CafePress is an automated e-commerce service that allows users to upload merchandise designs into online shops and/or the CafePress marketplace. The range of user-designed products varies widely in topic, taste and political opinion. CafePress’ independent design community spans the globe, with users representing multicultural and multinational ideals and sentiments. As such, users may upload designs that some find distasteful or offensive, but are nevertheless consistent with our policies for expressions and content on our website. At times, user-uploaded designs are simply unacceptable based on our content usage policy and those images may be removed.

We encourage our customers to notify us at cup@cafepress.com if they see user content on CafePress that they feel violate our policies. We review all requests for content review, measure user-uploaded images against our policies and determine a plan of action if any is appropriate.

We regret any problems or concerns caused by the images in question. Please note that the user-uploaded images in question do not reflect the opinions of CafePress and its employees.

So thanks to the NewsTaco familia are in order. First to our readers for pointing the site out to us, specifically tex[t]mex galleryblog and Latino Rebels who started the info-wave last weekend. Also to all the folks who read the piece, commented on it or shared it. Your voice was amplified enough that it reached the ears of those who could bring the repulsive page down.

That one specific site is no longer there — gracias.

But our friends at tex[t]mex and Latino Rebels tell us that another Veer to the Right site remains on CafePress: Anti=Mexico Gifts.

This one should come down as well.