The Converse ‘lynching’ hysteria proves woke never went away

The left-wing US congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez recently tried to turn the page on the progressives’ feverish obsession with identity-based grievance and out-of-control cancellations by writing it all off: ‘Woke 1 was crazy.’ But if the bizarre hysteria surrounding an American shoe company’s supposed appeal to ‘lynching’ in a new commercial is anything to go by, then ‘Woke 1’ hasn’t gone anywhere – and it’s just as absurd, irrational and toxic as ever.

It all started when shoe brand Converse, which is owned by Nike, released a new ad campaign for its Chuck 70 X sneakers featuring K-pop artist Karina. If you watch the full campaign video, nothing about it will seem out of the ordinary. But in one particular still image taken from the campaign, a quirk of the lighting creates an optical illusion. If you look at it a certain way, and suspend your critical faculties, you might mistake the woman holding the shoes for the dangling feet of a hanging black person. Meanwhile, the light on her white skirt looks something like the shape of a Klansman’s hood.

That one still image was all it took to prompt an online meltdown that dominated trending discourse across TikTok and other social-media platforms. ‘This is a white-supremacy dog whistle’, one deranged woman declared to her millions of viewers on TikTok. ‘This is a KKK, white-supremacy, lynching dog whistle. These companies… have been putting out white-supremacy dog whistles since the beginning of [the Trump] administration because it is gaining them attention.’

In another example of America’s mental-health crisis, one white woman on TikTok – who claims to be ‘nonbinary’, because of course she does – was so eager to virtue-signal to her fellow white allies that she filmed herself lighting her Converse shoes on fire. The unhinged video quickly went viral and racked up nearly six million views. Inside her echo chamber of adoring white ‘allies’, she was lauded as stunning and brave, with no one pointing out the obvious: she had already paid for the shoes, and so her stunt accomplished nothing other than creating a minor fire hazard.

After the social-media firestorm ignited, black celebrities and civil-rights activists quickly joined in the hysteria, blasting Converse for its supposed racism and ignorance.

Here’s where the failure of the mainstream media comes in. A sane and responsible press would have responded to this meltdown by explaining to audiences why it is baseless and nonsensical. After all, Converse is a historically progressive company, with an extensive history of support for Pride and Black Lives Matter. Its head of marketing is a black man. There is literally no reason any company, let alone one so keen on staying in progressives’ good graces, would ever intentionally ‘dog whistle’ to the ‘KKK’ or invoke lynching in an advertisement. (Morality and brand risk aside, there’s just no actual meaningful market constituency this would actually appeal to!) The optical illusion that some are choosing to see as an ode to the Ku Klux Klan is easily explained by remembering that the Converse symbol is a black or white star, and that’s what the company was trying to recreate with that particular lighting – not, in fact, a Klan hood.

But no. US mainstream-media firms are still staffed by a combination of ideologues and cowards who refuse to question anything asserted by a black person, no matter how absurd. And so reporters at outlets like CBS News and the Washington Post have since made unqualified statements that the ad ‘evok[ed] racist imagery’ or ‘seemed to depict a lynching’. Countless other media outlets like the Associated Press parroted this line, without providing anything approaching a counterbalancing perspective or any kind of reality check.

The outrage has even reached the highest levels of US politics. A sitting congressman has blasted the out-of-context still from a Converse K-pop marketing campaign as ‘racist, reckless and deeply offensive’. The Congressional Black Caucus has demanded a meeting to berate Nike executives over this supposedly ‘deeply disturbing’ incident.

Predictably, Converse has responded with a cowering, quivering apology affirming these delusions and promising to ‘do better’. Not that apologising ever helps in these situations. One civil-rights lawyer has blasted the apology by saying, ‘Do better means catching this before it airs – not after we’re offended’.

The whole saga serves as a pathetic reminder that Americans are still vulnerable to woke psychosis, that our media and corporate institutions are still too cowardly to stand up for truth in the face of outrage mobs, and that our political elites are still eager to exploit even the most baseless grievance if it suits their narrative and agenda.

It’s almost like ‘Woke 1’ never ended after all.

Brad Polumbo is an independent journalist and host of the Brad vs Everyone podcast.