Harlem Bagel Shop Toasts Its Own Mascot After TikToker Declares The Cartoon Bagel In In Blackface

Bo’s Bagels in Harlem did the unthinkable this week: it took down a giant cardboard cartoon bagel that was standing on the sidewalk minding its own business, wearing sunglasses and flashing gold grills that said “Harlem World.” The crime? A TikToker with roughly 4,000 followers decided the thing was “blackface,” and the internet’s outrage machine did what it always does—turned a local shop into the villain of the week.

The cutout, designed by Harlem-based artist Tom Sanford, was a life-sized bagel character rocking shades, a massive gold ring stamped “NYC,” and those aforementioned grills. It doubled as the shop’s chalkboard. Sanford has done similar larger-than-life caricatures before, including New York Knicks pieces that ended up in City Hall during the team’s championship run. His stated goal with the bagel was straightforward: celebrate uptown streetwear and hip-hop culture that started in the neighborhood and went mainstream. Co-owner Ashley Dikos later told the Daily Mail they put it up about six weeks ago as part of their local artist program and thought it was cool. It’s a cartoon bagel, not a person.

That distinction did not survive contact with the timeline. Photographer Carl Broady first called it a “disrespectful caricature of black people,” pointing to the exaggerated features, bulging lips and teeth, and darkened tone as echoes of old racist imagery. Then TikToker Anastazia X showed up, filmed the thing, labeled it a “blackface bagel,” noted that the shop is white-owned, and said her earlier email to owner Andrew Martinez went unanswered. The video spread. Threats and harassing calls to the shop followed. Employees were told they should quit because the owners “hate” them. Martinez, a native New Yorker who has lived in Harlem for nearly 20 years, pulled the sign.

“It got completely out of hand by a bunch of people who know nothing about us,” Martinez told the New York Post. He added that the reaction felt bizarre because the shop has long donated to local schools and given food to homeless shelters, and actual Harlemites have generally liked the place. Anastazia X later said she was sorry for the harassment and didn’t intend or support it.

Street-level reaction in the neighborhood was not uniform. One longtime resident said the gold and the imagery felt like old-time stereotypes. Another, Genisha Metcalf, 39, told the Post, “That’s not blackface,” and that calling the sign racist went too far. Sanford, for his part, said he does not view uptown streetwear culture negatively and was trying to highlight positive contributions from the streets of his neighborhood.

This is the latest entry in the ongoing contest to find the most absurd object that can be declared racist if you squint hard enough and film it. A bagel with shades and grills, commissioned from a local artist to nod at local culture, gets the full cancel treatment from someone with a modest following, and the shop takes it down rather than keep dealing with the threats. The bagels themselves were never the problem. The performance of finding the problem was.

Whether the sign was tone-deaf, playful, or somewhere in between is debatable. Treating a cartoon breakfast food as the latest battlefield in the culture war, then watching a neighborhood business get hit with harassment, is not. The mascot is gone. The bagels are still there. Some people will keep arguing about the first one forever.