Dunkin Donuts is one of my favorite donut shops, and so I was interested when I saw them in the news today – the company recently terminated one of their advertisements featuring the celebrity chef Rachael Ray because of the scarf she wears in the ad. Ray is wearing a black-and-white fringed scarf which resembles the traditional Arab cloth headdress, kaffiyeh, and Dunkin Donuts was receiving complaints that the ad offered symbolic support for Muslim extremism and terrorism.

There are so many things wrong with this on so many levels—so much racial and cultural ignorance—I can’t even begin to elucidate. Here, I will stay away from comment on the ignorance and racist issues. Instead, this occurrence does prompt discussion and thought on how a company handles the ever-present issue of racial and cultural sensitivity. The American public, even the world’s public, is always changing what is deemed permissible to talk about and what’s taboo. Symbols change, words change, peoples’ frames of reference change. How does a company keep up with it all?