Volkswagen Apologizes for Racist Ad

Volkswagen has apologized for posting a racist video promoting its new Golf 8 on the company’s official Instagram page.

The video clip has been withdrawn but not before it was re-posted elsewhere on social media. It showed an outsized white hand pushing a black man away from a parked VW Golf, before flicking him into a restaurant called Petit Colon, which translates from French as the Little Colonist or Little Settler.

“We posted a racist advertising video on Volkswagen’s Instagram channel,” the VW brand’s head of sales and marketing Jürgen Stackmann and group head of diversity Elke Heitmüller said in an apology posted on social media. “We understand the public outrage at this. Because we’re horrified, too,” they added.

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Volkswagen (VLKAF) apologized in a separate statement and said that, given its own history, “it does not tolerate any form of racism, xenophobia or discrimination.”

The company was founded in 1937 under the Nazi regime and used slave labor from concentration camps to build vehicles in its early years. {snip}

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