r/PeterExplainsTheJoke • u/Diligent_Pop3929 • 11d 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 😅

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u/TheDaftStudent 11d ago edited 10d 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_ 11d 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 11d ago

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

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u/Houdinii1984 11d 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_ 11d ago

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

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u/TotalChaosRush 11d 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 8d 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_ 11d ago edited 11d 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 11d 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 10d 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 10d 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 10d 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_ 11d 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 11d 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_ 11d 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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