After the fatal shooting of nine black people at Emmanuel African Methodist Church in Charleston, SC, last week, Amazon announced on Tuesday that it will join Wal-Mart, Sears, Target, eBay, and other major retailers in banning the sale of the Confederate flag and any other merchandise that bears the flag’s image.

In the hours leading up to Amazon’s decision, just as Governor Nikki Haley called for the removal of the Confederate flag from the State House building (where it still flies at full staff), more than 29,000 flag-related items were available on Amazon, “including bikinis, shower curtains, ceramic coasters, cupcake toppers, and a tongue ring,” and Amazon’s sales of the flag itself shot up by at least 3,620 percent.

Before Tuesday, the online retailer had apparently not included the Confederate flag on its list of “Offensive Products”–defined as “Products that promote or glorify hatred, violence, racial, sexual or religious intolerance or promote organizations with such views”–one of 32 categories of items that the company reserves the right to ban from its website.

But even merchandise that is meant to be regulated can “still get through the gates undetected.” Notably, Amazon has maintained what CNN Money calls “something of an on-again / off-again Nazi problem over the past several years,” and continues to sell, through third parties, algorithm-confounding items like, uh, these.

Other products, sold by Amazon directly, have been the subject of controversy for years. Amazon’s own review of Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion—a fraudulent, anti-Semitic document alleging a Jewish conspiracy for world domination—for example, reads:

Amazon.com obviously does not endorse The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion. This book is one of the most infamous, and tragically influential, examples of racist propaganda ever written. It may be useful to some as a tool in the teaching of the history of anti-Semitism, but it’s unquestionably propaganda.. . .

Should Amazon.com sell The Protocols and other controversial works? As a bookseller, Amazon.com strongly believes that providing open access to written speech, no matter how hateful or ugly, is one of the most important things we do. It’s a service that the United States Constitution protects, and one that follows a long tradition of booksellers serving as guardians of free expression in our society.

But symbols of hate are symbols of hate, and while efforts to remove them from stores and from government buildings are very important, our problem is obviously much bigger. As Claudia Rankine wrote in her profoundly affecting piece for the New York Times Magazine, “The Condition of Black Life Is One of Mourning,” “The unarmed, slain black bodies in public spaces turn grief into our everyday feeling that something is wrong everywhere and all the time, even if locally things appear normal. Having coffee, walking the dog, reading the paper, taking the elevator to the office, dropping the kids off at school: All of this good life is surrounded by the ambient feeling that at any given moment, a black person is being killed in the street or in his home by the armed hatred of a fellow American.”