Home Depot in hot water over alleged racist imagery in tweet

Home Depot, as sponsor of ESPN’s College Gameday, likes to drum up synergistic promotion for their brand and for ESPN’s weekly football show. But today they failed in spectacular fashion with the below tweet, featuring two African-American bucket drummers and a monkey. It was an attempt to be clever (I guess?) but, instead, it just played on an old, horrendous racial caricature.

Do you find Home Depot’s tweet offensive?

Home Depot is now in damage control overdrive on social media, which in their view amounts a copy/paste of the same meager platitude towards every person that complained. Meanwhile, College Game Day has kept their tweets focused to solely football.

UPDATE: We’ve added some reaction from Twitter.

[View the story “Reaction to Home Depot’s racist tweet” on Storify][h/t Jacqui]