While preparing to write about the alleged lynching imagery in a Converse advertisement, I discovered that I may be sitting on much more serious evidence. These are my shoes as I noticed them in my apartment this morning.

Black Converse. Hanging by their laces. Embroidered with a corpse. I had thought this was a tasteful little memento mori situation. I now realize I have apparently constructed an installation so racially explosive that Converse’s marketing department would have to issue three statements and put everyone involved through sensitivity training.

In my defense, I bought them because I like skulls. Which, until approximately five minutes ago, I believed was still legal. I await my visit from the Southern Poverty Law Center. Yes, this is a response to the latest Woke controversy du jour. But I find those — all of them — so profoundly stupid, and such a waste of my one and only life, that I wouldn’t be writing about it if I didn’t believe I had more to say than “LOL look at these stupid Woke bitches.”

Converse recently released an ad featuring K-pop star Karina in a long white skirt and black Converse sneakers, with a star-shaped light projected across her body. Someone noticed that, if you look at the resulting shapes just right (i.e., while squinting hard enough to time-travel back to 1946 and chanting: “I do believe in racism! I do! I do!”), the white fabric can resemble a Ku Klux Klan hood, while the black sneakers underneath can be interpreted as the feet of a lynching victim. And because this is 2026, “that kind of looks unfortunate” lasted approximately eleven seconds before becoming CONVERSE PUBLISHED RACIST LYNCHING IMAGERY.

The company pulled the ad and apologized, saying it had “got this wrong.”

…The relevant “experience” the Woke TikTokers are bringing to the Converse ad is, for the most part, that they grew up in America, went through American schools, watched American movies and documentaries, and were taught — over and over and over again — to recognize a particular set of images from our racial history: the hood, the noose, the dangling body, the burning cross.

And of course, we should know our history. Good and bad. The problem is that we have become vastly better at teaching the bad than at putting it in proportion to the whole.So what happens when you teach history primarily as a catalog of horrors and moral warning signs, without teaching people how to distinguish an actual historical symbol from an accidental resemblance to one?

That is how you get people who are exquisitely trained to spot racism and increasingly unable to tell whether they have actually spotted any.In that sense, this is iatrogenic. We spent decades trying to make Americans more alert to the ugliest parts of our history. Then social media added status rewards for being the first person to discover hidden bigotry in something everybody else had missed.Put those together and eventually somebody looks at a star-shaped patch of light falling across a white skirt and thinks: lynching!

And once the word has been supplied, thousands of other people can see it too.That does not mean their historical education was useless. It means it has become untethered from proportion, context, and evidence.

Knowing what a Klan hood looked like is education.

Seeing one wherever white fabric happens to form a triangle is conditioning.

Bingo!

As a final note, here is a vivid example in my own case. Once someone mentioned that a popular Christmas image that I’ve seen in yards near my house and hanging on Christmas trees looked like two T-Rexes fighting over a baby,

.

..I cannot see it any other way. I’m sure it was intentional.