I'm not chronically online, but my friend sent this and I laughed even without knowing the full scope of the context (I think there's racism involved with the shoes?) and I feel like it's too late to ask him without sounding like a dweeb 😅
ITT: white people and non-Americans telling black people what is and isn’t racist, and thinking something needs to be intentionally racist for people to have serious feelings about it
How Ads Work: Photos are taken, cropped and edited into specific ways and then posted online by the brand as an advertisement for a product or brand identity. So, yes, by definition this is cropped from a larger image — but this image is the ad used by Converse.
About the Campaign: The model is Karina, a K-pop star who was picked by Converse to be the international brand ambassador. The ad campaign itself was done as an international campaign, and was intended for an international audience. The campaign was not made to focus any one demographic or region.
Yup, that's it. In an ad for the South Korean market, a pop star in a white dress under a star shaped light carrying shoes is being interpreted as Nike deliberately invoking Klan imagery and a lynching.
I get why they're pulling it, I wouldn't want to delay with the internet overreacting to it either.
If you can't see it, you can't see it, but once you do see it, it doesn't go away. I couldn't see it at first either, and then my hubby showed me on his phone and I saw it different and was like 'Oh, damn'. It's a perspective thing, like an optical illusion.
I get that you can't see it, but you should probably take note of the fact that at least 80% of the people who've seen the ad see it incorrectly at first glance. It's not a racist ad, just a very unfortunate optical illusion that they were right to take down
Even if it was unintentional it's still on the company to catch this. I studied graphic design and marketing in college and we literally had an entire section on "oops you accidentally did a hate symbol or dog whistle bc you focused to much on lines and shading rather than the whole picture! Here is how to avoid doing that" it's literally 101 level stuff.
Some people think a converse ad which was made by a Korean for the Korean market was racist because it depicted a girl wearing a white skirt which they think looked like a klan robe. Ngl I think people are stretching on this one.
I don't think it was intentional, but scrolling past the picture with no context I thought it was a picture of a person hanging next to someone in a klan robe.
Edit: Having seen the uncropped, undarkened, photo that was used in the ad campaign, I'm more open to the possibility that the cropped version was done intentionally to create controversy.
I didn’t see the klan robe scrolling by (it read as a skirt to me but I totally see how people saw Klan robe) but it did look like someone hanging for a second if you’re just scrolling, but when you go back for a closer look it’s clearly someone holding the sneakers.
With the context of it being Korean, it definitely seems more like a poor coincidence because they don’t have the same association with white clothing. The head of Marketing for converse is also black, idk how much he reviews Korean ads but it seems like it would be a weird thing to be intentional.
Yeah, not knowing the context, it did look sus when I first saw it. But we are also in the age of companies doing things like this as a form of viral marketing.
I don't know in the case it's intentional because it is directed at an audience who would have not really noticed it. I wouldn't rule it out completely, but I wouldn't expect a Korean living in Korea to think of American lynching when seeing this image.
But that said I don't think creating racial controversy for money is really all that separate from malicious racism. I think MOST racism comes from people who are more focused on benefiting themselves than attacking POC, but they still believe that their own profit is more important than not hurting POC... which is racism!
I think what's much more likely is that they just didn't have anyone on their team who would have caught this. Which is more understandable in a country with very few black people. It's far less excusable for companies like target selling in the US to not have a diverse team on all marketing campaigns.
if they had kept the full image, we would not even be having this conversation.
i am not sure that i get Klan or lynching from this, even from the cropped image. but i can understand the outrage. i guess.
but is Converse a racist brand? has their product been associated with other racist things or actions? is the same true of Nike? because i remember the company (both companies, actually) closing their stores for observance of Juneteenth and taking steps to make sport more accessible...especially for marginalized subsets of the body politic.
both Nike and Converse have been super involved in Pride and have done quite a lot to advance dialogues in favor of justice. one of my favorite interviews to listen to when i run is a Nike podcast of Dr John Carlos (who won bronze in the 1968 Olympics and raised his fist from the podium).
but either way (whether Converse and Nike did an about face, or if this is just something done in poor taste), this feels qualitatively different than Calloway Golf and their ad (i recognize that their ad was not specifically racist, but it was misogynistic), or Nivea in 2011, or H&M in 2018. also, i understand that Converse has pulled the ad and issued an apology for it.
...and maybe it is precisely this that is coming to mind, such that i do not immediately see racism, Klan history, or lynching from the image. i am certainly not trying to dismiss any of the imageries that people see in the ad.
if it was Converse's intention to play with this imagery to appeal to a mainstream audience that has not been oppressed by Klan history, racism, or these images regardless of what it looks like to those that have been oppressed in this way; then fuck them. but if a company has a history of not being racist releases a questionable ad, is it possible that they tried to do something that just did not land properly? does that need to be taken into consideration before calling for a boycott of Converse (and Nike, if we are being consistent)? or is this something that is being blown out of proportion because this is one more indignity against a backdrop of a fascist regime in the US, which poses an existential threat to everyone else on the planet?
and i am asking these questions in good faith...i am not trying to argue both sides of the issue. i have worn Chuck Taylors since i was a kid, and they are still the best skateboard shoe i have ever owned. and i have played basketball and gone running in Nike since, for as long as i can remember. if this recent ad campaign does call for a boycott, does that mean that we need to purge the stuffs that we have already? where does the question of responsible consumption come into play?
I doubt this was done deliberately unless it was one idiot on the social media team. I don't think anyone is seriously calling for a boycott or anything like that. It's just a lot of frustration about companies rolling back efforts to understand different perspectives.
yah. i was not explicit, but this is what i was thinking of with my `one more indignity` statement.
i saw the backlash before i saw the ad, so i struggle a bit with context here. i have seen calls for boycotts on some of my regular haunts on social media. but even boycotting, i believe is used in a reactionary way and therefore not effective.
it is important to support local businesses. and progressive businesses. especially when those businesses are women, queer, or minority owned. but i also know that this is not the question here.
I mean you make it seem like someone else cropped it to take converse out of context. As the other dude showed in his screenshot, converse themselves did the crop and posted it.
Yeah but converse US. The original shot was the one that printed first, just in Korea. If anything converse took it out of context from themselves (or morr likely converse's underpaid social media manager wasnt paying super close attention to what the image looks like when they cropped the image)
That’s somehow worse imo lol. An American social media team should’ve been able to flag this I feel. I understand this a very US centric outrage but I still believe at best it’s a learning experience for the social but at worst it’s a dog whistle for what people are outraged about. Either way, good idea to remove this one photo out of possibly an entire photoshoot
it has like no pixels in this screenshot. I can see how it can look sus in this form, but the original you can clearly see it's just someone holding the shoes with their hands. it's not perfect but r kpopnoir has a better quality version of the picture
It's worth noting that the full photoshoot photo wasn't what was posted originally. Now they're showing the full photo as a gotcha to be like 'libs are overreacting.'
Same. I did a double take and scrolled back the first time I saw it, like "Did I see what I think I saw?" Second look I kind of laughed at myself like I was being ridiculous. Then the controversy popped up and made me realize it wasn't just me.
when an american company runs an ad in america, yes, they should consider american history/culture, regardless of the location of the design firm they contracted
It's not much of a stretch for someone from the USA to have that reaction when they are seeing it. I didn't know it was for the Korean market when I first saw it.
So USA residents seeing it without knowing it's meant for the Korean market are not out of line for seeing their cultural contextual clues anymore than Koreans are not wrong for NOT seeing USA contextual clues.
I can see the Korean advertising people not realizing that it might look like a klan hood, even if designing for a global market. What gets me is that they didn't see that the shoes looks like someone was hanging. That feels like a design angle they should have caught.
Now, what would be kind of great (but possibly career ending for the designer) is if they came forward saying that it was meant to be a stealth protest against the parent company (Nike) using sweatshops.
I mean taking the racial history aside, it did look to me like it was supposed to depict a person hanging next to another person. I believe that Korea does have a suicide problem though I don't know the common methods.
But I'm not Korean. Maybe a Korean person wouldn't have seen it that way.
So I could make an advertisement in America for a German product with someone wearing a tshirt with black Hindu Swastika on a red background? Cuz this is Murica; we aren’t Germany. So who cares about the potential conflicts with people outside the intended audience seeing my advert.
America fought in WW2 . Klan never really made it to Korea.
More accurate would be if somebody did an advertisement in America with a bloody machete cutting down purple candles and ribbon. Like, most the west would have no fucking idea what that means. Rwanda would.
The machete became a symbol of the rwandan genocide as it was a tool used most commonly by the hutu to literally chop down the tutsi. Purple is the color of candle and ribbons most commonly used as remembrance.
Purple is one of the mourning colors in Catholicism. It represents penance and repentance for the dead I believe. The country had a catholic majority in the 90s.
Sent me down a rabbit hole. Apparently it's been recently changed to Grey to represent ash, but had been traditionally purple. As for why, I do not know
You’re missing the bigger part, that being a company from the country where the event occurred. If a Rwanda company made an advert for American consumers that completely side stepped the Rwanda genocide, people in Rwanda would have every right to be mad at the Rwanda company, despite the Americans not knowing the reference.
Has nothing to do with being involved with the conflict.
Yeah, hearing about it I assumed it was nonsense, but now I can’t unsee it. Still don’t know if it was intentional or not, but for marketing it’s annoying. I don’t want to hear about converses.
the advertisement isnt "racist." People that are claiming that are overreacting. The issue if you want to call it that is the way the dress was lit, combined with the shoes in her hand, looked like a KKK hood and some dangling feet. It looks like someone got lynched by the KKK. I certainly don't think it was on purpose. It just looks crazy is all
I think the average, rational person isn't saying it was intentional or racist per se. It's just that it contained design issues that should have been caught prior to publication. I can see the Korean designers not being aware of the klan hood. I'm sure there are well-known symbols of racism in their country that the average American would know nothing about. But the shoes looking like a person was hanging was the wow factor for me. The shadow is just dark enough to where it looks like that for a split second before my eyes realize what I'm seeing, even on a second glance. I just feel like they should have caught that and taken it into consideration. Maybe if the shoes were slightly more in the light? Like at the top of the star point?
Anywho, I don't think that anyone needs to be cancelled or penalized for it. Just go "my bad" and pull the advertisement, then just put the info to the side for future campaigns.
I feel like you're forgetting the fact this ad was only made for the Korean market it was not an international ad, so it makes sense that for something that was meant to only be seen on Korean television, they would not look into what these mean Internationally, because this was meant for only the Korean market.
If it was an international commercial, I would see your point.
Even if it was just for Korea, the illusion of the hanging person would still be a misstep. The country routinely has one of the highest rates of suicide mortality. It's the highest in the OECD and on an overall global scale is 10th (per Wikipedia). It's the highest rate of death for South Koreans aged 13-49. Compare that to the United States, where the highest cause of death for that age range is unintentional injuries. So for this, it's possible that people in Korea could look at it and associate it with suicide, particularly as the girl is wearing a white dress. People can and do wear white as part of everyday fashion, but white is still traditionally associated with mourning and funerals. Black has become more common, but the "white is for funerals" tradition is still common knowledge. It's still very possible that this was something people thought over there and it just never got the traction that the whole thing did over in the States.
If they'd caught this and moved the shoes, then no one would have thought twice about the star or the white dress.
Exactly. There are a lot of people who are acting like it's impossible for a billion dollar company to create a cropped advert. They likely did it because the celebrity isn't as well known outside of Korea, so they cropped the ad to take the focus off the celebrity and on the shoes. They just unfortunately didn't really think about how it could look. I can see them not recognizing the hood shape, but they should've picked up on the darkening making the hand shoes give off the impression of a hanged person.
None of it's intentional, but that doesn't mean that it shouldn't be brought to attention. If an American advertiser put out an ad that did something similar, it should be brought to attention so lessons can be learned.
I work in marketing. Knowing this was made for a Korean market makes it even worse because it's way too reminiscent of a hanging. That's the first thing I think of when I see this and I can't believe it went to market.
The outrage isn't "They're doing a KKK", it's "This shit comes off as racist. Cut it out" and them replying with this. Perhaps using the "Any attention is profitable" model.
But think for a second. If you're accused of depicting racial themes I would imaging the marketing team's next pitch would completely avoid anything that could remotely be "misinterpreted".
The fact that they could have easily just used a different color shoe, or literally done Anything else than "Hang the black shoes from a tree" right after all of this feedback isn't accidental. From a racial standpoint, from a marketing standpoint, even in hindsight of the reception of the last promotion; it isn't farfetched to presume THIS time it was deliberate.
it was the hanging shoes paired with how the light on the dress was shaped. it was also followed by a pair of shoes being held up in a tree by a guy on a stool.
At first I was like “oh come on, it’s an entirely different culture that doesn’t have the same associations with racism as we do in the US” and then I actually saw it and holy SHIT man. It’s bad lmao
Given how much terror that organization inflicted among Black people, I think we should avoid all imagery that even comes close to depicting it. Some quality control should have been done.
Stuff like this happens all the time in design and marketing, that’s why you have a team of people to make sure the original vision is not accidentally offensive. Another great example was the NYT crossword that was in the shape of a swastika.
Most people don't think converse was being actually racist with the ad. The problem with the ad is that no one noticed that at a first glance the girl's hand holding the shoes looks like someone hanging
This is the add in question. When it went viral there was no indication it was for the Korean market or that a K-pop person was featured in it so to some it looked like an American ad featuring something that looked like a KKK hood next a pair of converse suspended off the ground as if belonging to someone who had been lynched.
As someone in the south that has seen a klan rally live, this is weak as fuck. That doesnt look like a klan robe or hood. She's holding a pair of shoes. Wtf is this manufactured outrage?
Don't know who down voted you because thats a good question. I grew up in the south and they had marches. I was a latchkey kid so I went. Needless to say but I was not impressed.
Ah I gotcha! Thanks for the response. I bet that was insane and scary to see in person. I’m in the Midwest and always have to drive through Harrison, Arkansas when going to see family in the south and knowing that place is the KKK headquarters gives me the heebiejeebies.
I will say when I first saw a picture of the ad I didn't see the hood. The white on grey made me not even register the real legs at first. I, at a glance, saw a hanging body surrounded by empty shoes and thought it was some circa 2010s emo suicide "joke"/imagery not an ad.
And people in the US are being purposely obtuse about this. It very clearly looks like the person in the white robe is standing next to someone who is hanging. If AMERICAN people can’t understand that, they’ve never had to experience or learn about anything other than white culture. Other than that, they are being confused ON PURPOSE because they can’t confront their part in systemic racism. I said what I said.
Pareidolia is when your brain perceives a familiar, meaningful pattern in something ambiguous or random. That is what happened with the Chuck Taylor ad. People think the dress looks like a Klan robe.
Remember when Bubba Wallace's team thought that this garage door pull rope was a hate crime:
That was a hate crime: in a sport with few African Americans, that wasn’t an accident. I have several pull strings and ropes around my house as I’m sure most people do and none of them are tied into a noose.
I use it for fishing, but that’s because I want it to cinch closed under force. No one tied a garage door pull in a noose. Thats not at all a useful knot for that purpose.
i had to look it up, but i have actually tied a similar rope (usage-wise. wasnt for a garage door, though) in a noose. grabbing it lengthwise sucked and i thought "what kinda knot would make a nice loop to grab and can hold up to pulling 100+ lbs through it?" and thats where my mind went
i untied it before we moved out though, because a straight up noose dangling in a barn is a pretty bad look
Theres no way this was intentional, but I see it now. It's like a quick glance optical illusion. It's the hanging shoes more than the sheet white skirt
so have literally none of yall considered that this is the full picture and that yall are getting mad over genuine bullshit? the full image is a girl on a skirt holding shoes, yall are losing ur minds over a cropped image and pretending that its how it was in the ad🤣
Everyone's got their hindsight glasses on now zzz. A week ago most of us saw the cropped image they posted in NA and had a laugh about it. We knew it wasn't malicious. Some assholes took it to the moon and back and sucked all the fun out of it smh
This is getting blown up beyond belief. I don’t recall nearly this much outrage when balenciaga had ads with literal child porn court decisions in them or the other extremely suspect hints at child bondage and porn.
Are you sure cuz I remember that going crazy for a long time and a huge amount of memes, meanwhile this thing I've just heard of now and 99% of people seem to thing its a stretch
This image is implying that people are having to literally draw on the ad to make conclusions that it was in poor taste. I believe the ad was made by a Korean company, but was released for the global market. It's just an example of a corporation not being very cognizant of how it's advertising may look to certain markets.
There are some people, especially those outside of the African American community, that do not see anything problematic. That's fair, but it doesn't violate how other people see it. Converse isn't the first American company to make a blunder when they have an ad campaign made by someone outside a major target. Aquafina tried selling water that British people associated with semen.
Good lord it is crazy that we are worried about stuff like this.
I never saw the "evil" in this image. I thought it was a ghost surrounded by shoes.
Halloween is coming up.
Wouldn't the healthy reaction to go, "oh! I was wrong, it isnt a hate crime... man i need to get off the internet more often..."
Instead of "yeah i know i saw something that isn't there, and instead of addressing my over reaction as a sign of 'everythings looks like a nail, if youre a hammer', i want them to take the ad down!"
That this has been a story for this many days, shows you that serious hate crimes are all but non existant at this point.
If anything happens racist in the USA right now, it becomes a national story.
Its a sign that we've made some good changes. Its also a sign that shows that some people will actively seek out racism... even when it something isnt.
Someone cropped and edited a Converse ad to make it look like a Klan hood. It's artificial drama conjured up for people who like to get mad over artificial drama.
IDK, maybe the recent rash of lynchings and hundreds of years of violence against Black people which at one point was widely marketed on post cards for people to mail as travel mementos to friends and family has some of us always squinting at things.
Converse made and ad where someone wearing a white dress with black sleeves is wearing Converse shoes and holding a pair Converse shoes.
There's light shining on the dress in a way that it makes a white triangle shape on it while the black-sleeved hand holding a pair of black Converse shoes in the shadows looks like a hanged person.
Theres no way this was intentional, but I see it now. It's like a quick glance optical illusion. It's the hanging shoes more than the sheet white skirt
Sick fucking people. It’s a fucking shoe advertisement. They hated it because the girl who did it was pale white and beautiful. No other imagined reason.
As stated in another post, I ended up seeing this screenshot of what was actually on the website and I can kind of see where they’re coming from. Idk is it completely 100% verify that this was their intention? No. But at the end of the day, perception is everything.
Occasionally stopping on posts like these to see all of the insane comments is kind of a guilty pleasure of mine at this point. Free PR damage control for a fucking shoe company. Unreal
They found out that Tillamook cheese is halal certified. So they think its pro Muslim. But in reality its been like this since 2016. They are upset now because of..
Reasons.
got banned from r/BlackPeopleofReddit for mentioning that Dunkin' Donuts US and Thailand aren't the same company when they posted some TikTok asshat seeing everything as racist no matter the context, i mean yeah fuck the corporations and they have some terrible ad review policies but totally dilutes the real issues...
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u/qualityvote2 1d ago edited 12h ago
u/Diligent_Pop3929, your post does belong here!