An empty chair hung from a tree outside a Camas couple’s home in protest of President Barack Obama is drawing criticism from diversity advocates as an example of racial insensitivity against America’s first black president.

The plastic patio chair outside the home of George and Kathryn Maxwell is missing a leg, has the word “No-Bama” scrawled on it and once had two American flags taped to its back. The couple that hung the chair said they were inspired to put the empty chair in their yard after watching Clint Eastwood’s speech at this summer’s Republican National Convention.

In one of the convention’s most memorable moments, Eastwood spoke to an empty chair that was meant to symbolize Obama and his policies. The speech went viral, prompting people to take photos of themselves with empty chairs and to pretend as if they were interacting with the president.

To the horror of many civil rights activists across the country, however, some Obama opponents took the analogy one step further by hanging empty chairs from trees. The so-called “chair lynchings” have made headlines in Texas and Virginia.

“It is problematic, considering our unique history in the United States of America with lynching,” Clark College’s diversity adviser, Sirius Bonner, said in response to the hanging chair in Camas. “You can’t escape that this has a racially charged element to it because of our American history.”