The Terror of Repeated Consonants: Mom ‘Sickended’ by Company’s ‘Racist’ Message

Kinder Egg makes a limited edition toy, but you may not want your child to have it. At least, not if you’re like Kimberley, from Victoria, Australia.

The Kinder chocolate egg comes — or came — with a plastic, cartoonish character in the shape of an egg who’s holding three balloons. Each balloon has a “K” on it, for…Kinder.

Kimberley was horrified that her son could possibly come in contact with the toy. She expressed her dismay on the parenting site Kidspot.com.

Upon first encountering the terror of repeated consonants, she laughed:

“Initially, we laughed in shock. It was kind of like, ‘Are we seeing and reading this right?’”

Then she felt sick.

“As soon as you open the package, the toy comes in two parts. One is the egg and the other is the balloons with ‘KKK’ written on them. As soon as you see them, you notice it.”

She was beside herself.

“This is a massive oversight that anyone could have seen. It’s also hard to find something to say as the initials of Kinder Surprise aren’t ‘KKK’. It should have been just KS or KSCE (Kinder Surprise Crème Egg).”

Despite the fact that the KKK was (yes — was; they don’t currently exist to any notable degree) a group in the United States and has no ties whatsoever to Australia, Kimberley believes most Aussies know who they are.

“Even to this day, the KKK do exist. It raises questions as to what the company supports and if this is subliminal marketing.”

Uhhh…

“My son is 15 months old – so he doesn’t read but it would be easy for a kid who was old enough to read to ask what those initials meant.”

Uhhhhhhh….

That would be “Kinder.” Thrice.

She contacted Kinder — a company whose name begins with a “K” — to find out if they were trying to market the Ku Klux Klan.

Kinder responded:

We really are sorry for any offence caused due to the inference of how the three K’s read together on this toy. To offer some explanation of how this toy came to be, initially it was designed with one balloon with a “K” on it. However, two more were added to provide a more robust structure. Please be assured that we had absolutely no intention to make any association with the acronym.

Shewwww!!!! It’s so good to know that a candy company on the other side of the planet isn’t trying to subliminally indoctrinate toddlers with consonants that, when used in a series to represent a completely different idea in a totally different part of the world in reference to an organization from a different historical period, could indicate something that would be absurd.

That’s a load off my mind.

Kinder surely eased Kimberley’s mind with this great news:

[S]tock from this toy range has been withheld from the market and destroyed. Rest assured, we are revisiting our internal processes to ensure something like this cannot happen again. It was never intended for this toy to be offensive and we would like to extend our sincerest apologies.

And so, the world is safe. For Kimberley.

I’m not sure how old she is, but if you’d like to send her balloons for her birthday with her initial on them, please, for goodness sake: Don’t send three, you racist b*st*rds.

-Alex

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