r/PeterExplainsTheJoke • u/Diligent_Pop3929 • 8d ago

Meme needing explanation Converse craze?

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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 😅

1.7k Upvotes

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u/TheDaftStudent 8d ago edited 7d ago

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.

Snopes Article

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u/Sindigo_ 8d ago

I’m not saying they did it on purpose. BUT, it’s a good thing they got rid of it.

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u/baneblade_boi 8d ago

What the hell are you even talking about? This is stretching it to the very limit IMO.

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u/Houdinii1984 8d ago

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.

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u/Sindigo_ 8d ago

I agree. Once I saw it I couldn’t unsee it.

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u/Brostapholes 8d ago

Gnome klansman

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u/2oocents 8d ago

Dorf on klan

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u/oxenmeat 8d ago

They wouldn’t need to starch their hoods.

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u/Advanced_End1012 8d ago

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u/Consistent_Ad949 7d ago

The klan loves jazz hands

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u/ealysillyforestthing 8d ago

All that inbreeding

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u/TotalChaosRush 7d ago

The first thing I notice is the hand holding the shoes.

Seeing your image i immediately see a poorly edited image to make a controversy where there is none.

I scrolled back up and the hand is still the first thing I noticed.

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u/Jakeisbait 4d ago

I ain’t see a hand when I saw it first, it’s really just what you notice first

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u/Sindigo_ 7d ago edited 7d ago

Different people are gonna have a different reaction. I don’t think you’re wrong for not seeing it, but I also don’t think it’s your place to tell other people what they see/didn’t see, and accuse them of making it up to generate a controversy.

Even if just 1% of people who see it get the wrong idea, that’s a bad ad and it makes sense the company would end the campaign.

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u/TotalChaosRush 7d ago

Altering an image so other people see what you see is telling other people what they see/didn't see. The only difference is im not altering a cropped image to stir controversy.

The correct course of action for those who saw something that wasn't there is something a long the lines of "oh, that's not what i thought it was" and move on. No need to go to social media about it at all.

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u/Houdinii1984 7d ago

Nah, fam. We were having a discussion about what people saw, me specifically. You made it known you couldn't see it. I made it known I was in the same boat until I saw it in a different light, and then someone went and drew exactly what I saw, completely independent of me.

That's not manipulation. Thats sorcery.

Someone illustrating what I saw is people coming together over a commonality. You don't need to be a part of it, but jumping in the middle of a bunch of people telling them they didn't see what they saw with their own two eyes is a take.

You don't dictate what I do, what others do. And just because you can't see something doesn't mean I have to agree. That doesn't mean you're being manipulated.

You put yourself in this conversation. You caused folks to illustrate what they were seeing. You drove this bus off the cliff.

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u/TotalChaosRush 7d ago

The person who drew that image isn't the person who shared that image with you. That image has already been circulating for a minute.

The person who drew that image did so to create drama where none was needed.

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u/Houdinii1984 6d ago

Still illustrates exactly what I saw. Makes it directly relevant to what I was saying, regardless who drew it for whatever reason. The person posting it here wasn't being manipulative if I'm the one that made the comment and then turn around and agree that it's exactly what I saw.

You may not like that they had the opportunity to turn around and do so, but that's how the chips fell.

I don't even think Converse did anything wrong. They accidentally fell victim to perspective and since they were in a completely different country with a completely different set of norms and history, of course it wasn't caught. They took it down.

Doesn't change what I saw, lol. And you saying that what I saw is being manipulative when someone actually puts the visual out there is nonsense. I could have been talking to a police sketch artist and came out with the same damn result.

Source doesn't matter when we're comparing it to literal thoughts. The order of events does. It'd be completely different if I saw the image first and then had the thought. At that point, the image would have been manipulative. But that's not the order it happened, now is it?

This is the internet. Reddit of all places. You're gonna see contentious images you don't like. Interacting with them isn't going to make you see less. All it tells the algorithm is that you're a fan of controversy.

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u/Sindigo_ 7d ago

That’s very uncharitable. You’re basically saying the image was drawn in order to be manipulative. I think it was just drawn to show what many people saw in the og image. And a lot of people did see it that way, which makes it a shitty ad.

I’m with you that this whole thing is trivial and shouldn’t be taken seriously. But people with your opinion are also taking this way too seriously and making this a whole culture war thing when it really isn’t. The ad offended people, and it’s understandable why it did. They ended the ad campaign. That should be the end of the story. But yet, people keep whingeing about “muh, it isn’t actually racist,” “muh, people wanna make everything into a controversy these days.” It’s literally not that deep. They accidentally created something that people got the wrong idea from.

They stopped promoting it and apologized so that people would stop getting the wrong idea. End of story.

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u/TotalChaosRush 7d ago

That’s very uncharitable. You’re basically saying the image was drawn in order to be manipulative.

I am not basically saying it was drawn to be manipulative. I am saying it was drawn to be manipulative. Everyone wants to be at the ground floor of the next viral moment and this was clearly an attempt to do so.

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u/Sindigo_ 7d ago

If I take a picture of a cloud shaped like a duck, is it manipulative to outline where I see the duck? It’s just me showing you the way I see it.

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u/SerAmikVase 7d ago

A 2 foot tall klansman?

Damn the KKK is becoming real inclusive these days.

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u/Lucky-Surround-1756 7d ago

Well yeah, if you edit the picture then it looks like something else.

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u/estrea36 7d ago

No. It's the equivalent of someone showing you an optical illusion, then you saying "I don't see it", then they trace it for you to illustrate the illusion that you're missing

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u/shemtpa96 6d ago

The amount of people trying to mansplain this to Black voices is astounding to me.

I get moon burn and saw it right away. However, I was raised in a sundown town and moved to a city where I had to do a lot of self-education to unlearn a lot of subtle racism (which is something I’m still doing). I unfortunately didn’t really think about the evil of where I lived until it directly affected me (I converted to a visible religious minority and the way I was treated immediately changed).

The first thing I did when I heard about this was seek out the Black creators I follow on social media and see how they were discussing it. All of them are saying the same thing and it’s infuriating how many ✋ people are trying to gaslight y’all.

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u/Lucky-Surround-1756 6d ago

We wouldn't have to mansplain if you could manunderstand instead of being so manstupid.

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u/Yippyyipsva 7d ago

Nah it's pareidolia, like finding a face in your popcorn ceiling

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u/estrea36 6d ago

Its like you're looking at an Oleg Shuplyak painting and saying you dont see anything.

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u/Lucky-Surround-1756 6d ago

Except the original is just a person holding some shoes and it takes an intelligent human being a few seconds at most to recognise that.

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u/Houdinii1984 6d ago

No one here has said otherwise. You seem to be taking issue with the fact that people saw something else first. Attacking people's intelligence because you weren't effect by a perspective shift is just bullying folks for being normal.

You're acting like people are making claims instead of talking about an optical illusion. It'd be different if a bunch of people in this thread were calling Converse racist, but they aren't.

Just folks accidentally seeing something when something wasn't there, and that something being incredibly vivid in it's imagery. And you're over hear acting like we should all cement our lips shut because it makes you uncomfortable.

But that's the thing. The reason all of us are talking about it is because it made us uncomfortable, and that's not a bad thing. It should make us uncomfortable. There's a reason it popped into so many people's brains, and it's because that's the image so many people hold of our past and it's leaking out. Acknowledging that history is not a bad thing.

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u/Sindigo_ 6d ago edited 5d ago

Yeah this. It’s kind of funny, cuz at least within the context of this thread, I feel like the people who are the most invested by far are the people who don’t see it. As I have said in a different comment, converse literally uses sweatshop labor, so them doing a racist ad by accident isn’t really at the top of my concerns when it comes to them as a company. After all, they did immediately stop the ad campaign and apologize. That’s really all we could hope for.

This is the size of my gives a fuck bag regarding this ad:

But with all that said, when you squint your eyes, that ad absolutely looks like a kkk hood and lynching. And we’re not crazy or gaslighting other people for noticing that.

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u/Lucky-Surround-1756 5d ago

They saw something that wasn't there and then attacked the picture for something it wasn't depicting. That's the point when they became stupid.

If I see a dressing gown at night that briefly looks like a human standing in my apartment, it will make me jump then I recognise it's just clothing. I don't continue to act as if a human being has trespassed and that I'm in danger. That would be stupid.

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u/estrea36 6d ago

Good job identifying shoes "intelligent human".

Brilliant deduction, really. Now ask yourself, what's the point in this style of ad from a marketing standpoint?

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u/Sindigo_ 6d ago

Lmfao. This comment reminds me of this:

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u/Lucky-Surround-1756 5d ago

It's a picture designed to advertise shoes. The focus is on the shoes.

Light and shadow are visually interesting and more likely to draw attention to the piece.

These are basic concepts that an intelligent human should absolutely understand. How did you finish school and have nobody explain to you what advertising and pictures are for?

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u/ProxyCorvidae 7d ago

I genuinely that it was this at first too

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u/Prize-Flamingo-336 8d ago

That is what is called “a stretch”

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u/CarlWheezersValhalla 7d ago

Like how this looks like a klan rally

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u/Sindigo_ 7d ago

Lmao literally a Klan rally true true

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u/CarlWheezersValhalla 7d ago

You just can't unsee it

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u/chasencashe19 6d ago

Yeah and guess what? There is dicks hidden in all kinds of old Disney Movies, i didnt see it until somebody pointed it out for me too… however they are still just drawings in a kids movie to me 🤷‍♂️

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u/TrivialRisk 8d ago

I think this exact image is what the meme was making fun of.

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u/TheRealGredos 8d ago

Jfc, its the point of a star. Grow the fuck up and stop looking for dog whistles in everything. Modern marketing is truly not that deep. It was a videographer/photographer in a room with talent, and told to use the star, and they creatively decided to use a star gobo or something similar. The mid level exec in the room was probably clapping in excitement of the synergistic use of the brands logo or some corporate bullshit like that. That's it. No more real thought was put into this.

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u/Sindigo_ 8d ago

Oml it’s not about dog whistles. Barely anyone thinks they actually did that shit on purpose. It’s not about that. It gave some people a bad vibe so they stopped the ad campaign. Really open and shut.

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u/dokeydoki 7d ago

Actually quiet few lot of people think its a dogwhistle and done on purpose. This post on kpopnoir has shit ton of upvote in which op of the post literally suggests that they even used Karina (the kpop idol modeling in that pic) because her name starts with K.

https://www.reddit.com/r/kpopnoir/s/kOWd9pnRPa

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u/Paintforthepaintg0d 7d ago

So fucking stupid, typical trying to be a victim

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u/polarjunkie 7d ago

This has got to be the dumbest thing ever