A brief kerfuffle over an emote planned for Star Trek Online’s Risian Lohlunat Festival has already come to an end. As players on Reddit pointed out, PWE and Cryptic had signaled their aim to use a clip from the song Dixie as an audio emote reward in STO, prompting complaints from members of the community who argued the song’s connotations and history stood in contradiction to the Star Trek franchise’s generally egalitarian themes.

Dixie is an extremely well-known but controversial tune, having been associated with blackface minstrelsy and becoming the unofficial national anthem of the Confederacy and by extension the South. The STO clip appeared to be an homage to the obnoxious car horn in vintage TV show The Dukes of Hazzard, which utilized a few notes of the song.

We reached out to PWE for a statement this morning; the studio promptly told us it was removing the emote, and indeed, PWE then posted up a note on Twitter apologizing for any hurt it caused and vowing not to add the song as part of the event. It is not yet clear what might be replacing it.

We are deeply sorry for any hurt we may have caused. pic.twitter.com/hhC1r0CC7F — Star Trek Online (@trekonlinegame) June 25, 2019