An Online Store is Selling 'Black Girl Magic' Shirts Modeled on White People

Nothing brings to mind the power of #BlackGirlMagic quite like... white people. Over at the online marketplace Zazzle, a range of black empowerment t-shirts have popped up with one big, glaring problem--they're being modeled by white people. Seriously. On t-shirts that feature quotes like "Black Girl Magic," "Melanin Goddess" and "Strong Black Women," the smiling models are almost exclusively white.

This strange and offensive mistake first came to light after YouTuber Jackie Aina (also known by the lit moniker "La Bronze James") pointed it out. Since then, the Internet has clapped back at Zazzle for their tone deaf tees with a metric ton of shade.

In response to the backlash, Zazzle explained that the designers are allowed to customize their merchandise and pick from a computerized system of stock models to promote their designs, saying, "It's always possible that gender, race, and other attributes of the model do not match up to the specifics of the design, given the ratio of our millions of designs to the 100 or so T-shirt styles we offer."

According to a spokesperson, the company is now "working diligently on an interim fix that doesn't mismatch out-of-context content to models; some of the designs may be down temporarily while this is underway. At Zazzle, we're committed to diversity and are working diligently on increasing the diversity of the preposed model shots within the T-shirt range itself."

While we wait for them to fix the out-of-context content, we're left looking at these shirts and wondering about the inevitable next question: were there really no black stock models to use?