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"That is not satire. It’s downright racist"

A trading card company Topps has come under fire for showing BTS beaten up on one of their cards.

Topps released the BTS card as part of a series of their sticker trading cards called ‘the Garbage Pail Kids’. The series is inspired by the 2021 Grammy nominees.

Among the cards called ‘the Shammy Awards’ are caricatures of music stars such as Billie Eilish and Meghan Thee Stallion.

BTS’ card showed the Kpop group with bruised and cut faces as a hand uses a Grammy Award to play whack-a-mole on their heads. The card is titled ‘Bopping K-Pop’.

Twitter users took to the social media platform to express their outrage.

“The caricature version for the other artists seems cute and child-like, while the one for BTS depicts them as beaten, bruised with the look of fear on their face,” one person wrote.

“@Topps you’re supporting the hate against Asians, this is not even qualified as a garbage humour, this is hateful.”

The card was released amid a series of recent attacks on Asians across America. On Tuesday, eight women, six of whom were Asian, were shot and killed in Atlanta.

Another commenter wrote: “Just learned about the disgusting caricature Topps made of BTS. That is not satire. It’s downright racist. For anyone trying to brush it off as comedic, depicting violence like that toward an Asian group during these times is hateful & dangerous. What in the world.”

Topps has since apologised and has removed the card.

“We hear and understand our consumers who are upset about the portrayal of BTS in our GPK Shammy Awards product and we apologise for including it,” the company wrote on Twitter.

In other news, Teen Vogue’s Editor-in-Chief Alexi McCammond has stepped down after her racist tweets resurfaced.