And now, a stunning headline from “The Hill”:
Adidas pulls all-white sneaker created for Black History Month after Twitter backlash
Such an event, and such a headline, could only exist if the following were true:
1. U.S. culture has become obsessed with group identification and contrived racial grievances to an unhealthy, corrosive, dangerous degree.
2. There are no longer known or coherent standards for what constitutes offensive conduct regarding race. The standards are literally whatever a social justice warrior with an agenda, a race-grievance activist, or a politician seeking societal division for career advancement claims is racially offensive at any given moment.
3. No attempt at race-baiting aimed at whites is too ludicrous to be taken seriously, and the fact that the color-reversed version would be regarded as outrageous is no deterrent.
4. Corporations and other institutions run by (spineless and venal) bureaucracies are incapable of acting in a responsible, courageous manner when threatened by any criticism relating to race, no matter how contrived. As a result, they undermine cultural values by reinforcing false and damaging standards in high profile episodes.
5.Social media gives disproportionate power to mobs of anonymous, extreme, often unhinged and substantially ignorant people who do not represent the attitudes of the public as a whole but who wield unearned and dangerous influence simply because they can publish their ill-formed opinions and have nothing better to do with their abundant time and meager talents than to do so.
For the record, there is nothing whatsoever racist, insensitive, unethical or inappropriate about a shoe company featuring an all-white sneaker during Black History Month.
Trust me on this.
The more complex issue of whether a pluralistic, democratic nation like the United States, that is dedicated to equality and individual enterprise based on character and achievement should have any special celebrations based on race, gender or ethnicity i will leave for another time.
Ethics Alarms 
This is why innocence until proven guilty is a principle that should be inviolate.
Accusations take hold because people with an agenda and who care little for the social destruction they cause use them to crush adversaries. It is why civility is gone. Civility is not measured in terms of eloquent speech, it is measured in empathy and collegiality. The pen can be a sharp as a rapier.
The question is if corporations are venal and spineless for not standing up to a specious accusations why is it wrong if a politician stands firm against an unproven allegation.
All the evidence is out in the shoe case, and it proves the the accusation is false, The analogy would be if there was video of Fiarfax’s alleged rape, and it showed him kissing the woman on the cheek.
They don’t give a damn about truth.
Which is why the Congressional women were dressed all in white for the SOTU address.
They are all racists?
Logic dictates that conclusion
Jack: “For the record, there is nothing whatsoever racist, insensitive, unethical or inappropriate about a shoe company featuring an all-white sneaker during Black History Month.
“Trust me on this.”
I agree, but I see you left out “idiotic,” as that is exactly what this is. What possessed this company to think it needed to introduce a product for Black History Month? Idiocy.
But, if it makes you feel better, I hear they are working on a shoe for Women’s History Month in March. It will be pink. It too will be condemned, because there is no pleasing those who want to be displeased.
-Jut
P.S. As far as I know, they are NOT planning a pink shoe. The joke was merely to illustrate that this is a no-win game. Feminists would HATE a pink shoe
-Jut
But not a pink HAT…
See, the trap is that it doesn’t matter what color the shoe is, someone, somewhere without enough productive creative outlets in their life will manufacture a reason why it is racist/misogynistic/Islamophobic/whatever. A blue shoe or green shoe or beige shoe will be deemed just as pretend-offensive as a pink shoe, and a tortured, convoluted reason will be manufactured to support that contention.
This is a sport now. It is a game, and fear of the social media mob keeps these companies playing it, even if they don’t want to. Their grovelling apologies are how the score is kept.
What you are missing is that… there IS NO SHOE!
(now THAT is an obscure cultural reference)
A pussy shoe, then.
”A pussy shoe, then.”
And a better way to pussyfoot the light fantastic?
Glass half full?
I now have a better reason, (better than the guaranteed mockery, leastways) to keep my L.L. Bean White Bucs secured well-out-of-sight in a closet top shelf.
For the record; our society is really screwed up now, it will take a few generations to get out of this,the problem is that progressives and sicial justice warriors pushing the sweeping idiotic social changes actually think their idiocy is the “right” way to go. They’re brainwashed.
Z: Are the SJW and leftists brainwashed? Or are they the brainwashers of generations leading us to this point? I think it’s the latter.
The progressives are the brainwashers, the social justice warriors and a vast majority of the left are the brainwashed. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is a direct product of the brainwashing after being completely dumbed down, she’s a blithering idiot and the people that voted for her are ignorant fools.
Hold on, it gets better. The shoes are made of…wait for it…COTTON!!! AHHHHHHH!!!
Signature significance is right!
Might Native Americans now manufacture, I mean discover, something horribly demeaning with The Man With One Red Shoe, other than its unapologetic kitsch?
Black loafers? Fuggedaboudit!!
Flip-flops for Take your Congressman Out to Lunch Month?
I’d be for that before I was against it…
Everything else you wrote above fundamentally derives from #5.
Social media is currently evil, undemocratic and disproportionately powerful. It is an existential threat to our system of government and must either be regulated or utterly banned.
I hate to take that position, but there are times when technology and innovation outraces our maturity as a species, and social media is one of those things. It has become so destructive of our culture that it is becoming unrecognizable. We simply cannot handle what social media has wrought as a body politic.
Definitely not. Social media speech is still free speech. Regulation will only led to “approved” speech being allowed. The only regulation I would support is one that guarantees the company doesn’t filter or ban any speech. See the intersection of “Ethics Alarms” and “Facebook” for an obvious example of how things shouldn’t be.
No, it’s not free speech. It’s speech controlled by one side of the argument. By definition, that is not free.
I read it: a race grievance artist!
It’s stories like this one that convince me that the USA is doomed.
Utterly ridiculous. What statement is Mookie Betts making with his bright pink baseball cleats? Support for the LGTB community? Or if he changes his shoe color, will he be making a different political statement? When politics and ideology demands the color of SHOES that are sold, we are in big trouble. Even though it’s February, I think I’ll try to find a pair of white summer shoes and wear them all month.
What is happening here? Creeping totalitarianism, that’s what.
Toe-talitarianism?
That joke was so bad, my wounds may never heel….
–Dwayne
Look at it from a different ankle. Sometimes that helps.
I was going to comment we should get to the sole of the matter, but it seems the two of you have that all laced up.
Oh, perhaps I am feeling a bit pessimistic . . .
I am not, I don’t think, very commensurate to my own task, though I wish I were. The task being *the understand the time we live in*.
We are in a strange juncture. (As an interesting aside, I wish to point out that the American angst, whatever it ultimately is, has — is having — a great effect and influence worldwide. Everyone is looking at America and saying: What?!?)
Who can define, from the bird’s eye view, what really is going on, and why? (And if they can’t, why not?)
The ultimate, the necessary the inevitable, result of the scientific revolution and the overturning of scholastic interpretation of existence, in contradistinction to the Christian metaphysical vision, is the reduction of man and all of nature to machinery. As a result, man ceases to be *man* as formerly defined. He has lost the *vertical* dimensions for the strictly horizontal. That is, transcendence gives fully way to pragmatic immanence.
If this is so, if it is not just poetic (or philosophical) licence, it may be accurate and necessary to say that man is being reduced ‘simply’ to a malleable component within a larger, *industrial* framework. That framework gains such power that it *determines* what man means. And what he now means is very very different from what he meant.
Therefore, I would suggest that we are in a liminal zone and *on the verge* of the transformation I outline: it is from a veritable humanism to a robot-like semi-existence: to cog-dom. It seems to me have to take into consideration the dystopian visions, which, in their different forms, are a sort of prophetic vision.
The foundations of *freedom* — the very notion of freedom in fact — has been outmoded — superseded. The ‘free man’ is no longer necessary. In a certain very real sense *freedom* no longer applies. Therefore, the political systems that were founded on and through exalted notions like ‘freedom’ must now be restructured & remodeled. But a pretext is required.
Apparently, the pretext that is being developed is one based on notions of material-ecological catastrophe with a sub-project of acute egalitarianism. If indeed ‘we’ are not exaggerating in what we see & fear, which is to say hallucinating, and if indeed certain confining walls appear around us that a few minutes ago were not there, and if we start to use terms like *totalitarianism* and *mind-control*, on one hand we show our own relationship to the general angst & confusion, but then we also have intuitive senses that have been activated by the bizarre events of the day.
Wait? Is Michael Jordan a racist now?
I’m confused!!!