I can understand why a company would avoid this, due to the current culture of recreational offence.
Yes, there is a somewhat splattered history of calling black people a monkey as an insult. But there is also a history of calling a young boy a monkey, I call my my boy monkey/little monkey/cheeky monkey all the time. I was also as a child.
At worst it's mildly insensitive, in no way is this deliberately hateful or expressive of racist sentiment. If anything the people involved were guilty of nothing more than being colour blind (something which I think society would do better in if we all adopted).
My main objection is the perpetually offended picking ditches like this to fight in. There is clearly no malicious intent, the people involved (mother and child) are clearly not unset/hurt by this. This is a group of people who have identity tuned to maximum on the radar decided that the view they posses is the only one which has value.
The other point is, a majority of the black people online & who I've spoken to about this (as I wasn't sure if I was being insensitive - as I've not been called a monkey as an insult) think the entire thing is ridiculous & beyond a minority of online virtue signallers not a problem either.
Yes it should be avoided for simple pragmatic reasons, but this level of uproar & attacks on the mother (I read things saying she would dress her kid in a KKK outfit & her doing this is basically child abuse...) is appears to be somewhat misguided.
