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,
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..I cannot see it any other way. I’m sure it was intentional.
the way folks look at the world is truly insane. I am currently in a training class with 20somethings and few older folks. Everyone else is a POC. The instructor brought up this “issue” and got a general rumble of agreement that it at the least looked bad. He did talk about Converse history a bit.
OhOH. I just realized from all previously written on this post that stars are racist. If you will take time to attend to your favorite star of preference, notice that when you squint just right, there are 5 hood looking extensions on every common star shape. See. The more points on the star, the more racist it is, even if the image has T-Rexes fighting over who’s going to get to eat baby Jesus. Geez America sucks! Who will evere rid us of this racis problems.
I’m sorry, she’s a what now?
Is it just me, or does she sound like somebody with no real job and only a hammer to to it with?
“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,”
My eyes! My eyes! Why did you do that to me?
I know.
Maybe it really was intentional…
I can’t see the T-Rexes no matter how hard I try…and I loved looking at those hidden 3-D images years ago.
That speaks well for you. I see dinosaurs in everything and have since I was 5.
Only look for heads with open mouths, looking up at the sky – no bodies, no tiny little arms.
These social justice race baiters have completely lost their collective minds. They really do need psychological help.
I tend to agree with what you wrote, Jack. It is a proverbial tempest in a teapot.
Yet, here we are. Egg meet face.
I cannot fault the K-pop star. I believe she is Korean, so she probably has no idea what the image could have conveyed.
Converse, though, let this happen: Someone in their marketing division came up with or approved this marketing strategy and either thought “wow – that’s edgy and cool” or, more cynically, “let’s see what happens – maybe we can get away with this.” Someone with an IQ above room temperature should have looked at the photo or ad campaign and asked, “When did we start eulogizing Emmitt Till?” Self-inflicted controversies like this are beyond belief.
To me the ethics here is not necessarily the response of the Al Sharptons of the world but the absolute deleriction of duty in companies to protect their brands. It happened with Bud Light (Bud Light lost something like 25 to 30 percent of its market share and billions of dollars with that stupid faux woman ad). It happened when GM wanted to sell Novas in Spain and Latin America but couldn’t figure out why that market wouldn’t buy the cars (uh, dude, “nova” in Spanish means “it doesn’t run”). It happened when the Lululemon president stated that he wasn’t marketing his yoga pants to plus-size ladies (oops).* There are tons of other mistakes that could have and should have been prevented had someone stepped up and said, “yeah, this is a dumb idea and we are gonna lose money because of it, which will not make our shareholders happy.”
jvb
*Ed. Note: I don’t fault American Eagle for the “great genes” campaign, though. I thought it was a clever play on words and the controversy contrived.
Perhaps every marketing department should hire someone as race-rabid as Ben Crump and pay them bonuses for every possible scintilla of racism to avoid publishing something racist. Or BLM could function as an official accrediting agency for authorizing who is qualified to determine racism-free advertising.
“Converse, though, let this happen: Someone in their marketing division came up with or approved this marketing strategy and either thought “wow – that’s edgy and cool” or, more cynically, “let’s see what happens – maybe we can get away with this.” Someone with an IQ above room temperature should have looked at the photo or ad campaign and asked, “When did we start eulogizing Emmitt Till?” Self-inflicted controversies like this are beyond belief.”
Completely disagree.
The people who created and approved that are most certainly of the generations that grew up in an educational and social system that worshipped diversity and sensitivity of any “oppressed” group. They’d never intend, see, or comprehend that it could ever be interpreted as anything but edgy and cool.
Once the race hustling whores saw the equivalent of the T-Rex nativity scene as a way to make obscene amounts of money, it was over. Because Converse are of such generations, they believe groveling to TRHW as their righteous contrition – the ONLY right option as they see it.
Anybody with an IQ above room temperature on a cold day, when the heater is broken, knows what a giant crock of crap TRHW are pushing. The End.
I don’t disagree. However, a tennis shoe/apparel company like Converse is not normally known for its edgy ad campaigns. Benetton, Guess, American Eagle (to an extent), and others have skated controversy because that is what those brands pedal and their customer bases approve.
Converse, on the other hand, is in the business of selling moderatley priced traditional clothing and activewear – that should be its primary activity because the more attire they sell, the more money they make for their shareholders.
Putting this kind of idiotic ad out into commerce unnecessarily hurts its brand and market share, notwithstanding the maxim “their is no such thing as bad publicity.” Budweiser’s experience would suggest otherwise.
If the ad and marketing people couldn’t figure out that the photo would resemble a lynching, then those people should be fired. I don’t care that they may be millenials or GenZ. Someone in the marketing department should have said, “Uh, nice photo. Try something else.”
jvb
Your insensitivity to the T-Rex community is astonishing. There is no way they would fight over the baby, they would’ve applied Solomon’s wisdom. To suggest otherwise is offensive and perpetuates hurtful steroypes of the T-Rex community as vicious carnivores. I think you should be sent to re-education ca… er… sensitivity training.
It’s a good thing I’m not in charge of Converse, I’d have put out a statement calling the “outrage” a poor attempt at high tech lynching, and anybody who took the race hustling whores seriously was a complete moron.
Five or so years ago I might’ve had some sympathy for those saying the ad could possibly have some overtones, but the absolute clown show the left has become has obliterated any consideration I might give arguments from “the other side” on ANY social or political issues.
That was a fun read.
jvb
What a weird, confusing photograph. To sell Chucks.
Yes! Young Bill – I don’t object to the ad because of alleged racism – it’s just not good.
Jack! Love the T-Rexes.
As for Converse – they’ve been producing canvas shoes for over one hundred years. By the 1960’s more than 70% of basketball players wore them.
I got my first pair as hand-me-ups. My younger brother had outgrown his white high tops, gave them to me to wear for gym class.
I currently have nine pair in six different colors.
I’ve seen what is supposed to be the commercial video this image came from, so it looks like someone took an image from it and blew it up to eliminate any extra details that didn’t contribute to this narrative. It reminds me a bit of the craze in the 1970s or so about subliminal images in advertising, where images in the ice cubes in a glass spelled out “sex” or something else. If you scrutinized them long enough, you’d see something, sooner or later. Unfortunately, once a ball like this starts rolling, it is nearly impossible to change course.
I live near a city that tries painfully hard to be ‘trendy’ (think using slightly corroded iron pipes for all the chair rails in their restaurant). So, I wouldn’t have looked twice at this picture.
The British royal cost of arms contains a phrase in old Norman French, “HONI SOIT QUI MAL Y PENSE“. The precise translation to modern English is debated, but the basic meaning is “Shame on those who see evil where none exists“.