Converse Pulls Ad After Outrage Over Racist Imagery
I don’t know how, in the big ‘26, companies are still stepping on rakes when it comes to racist advertising. Converse has pulled a recent ad campaign and issued an apology after widespread outrage over the racist connotations.
The Washington Post reports that the ad campaign promoted the Chuck 70 X, a redesign of the brand’s signature Chuck Taylor shoe. The company removed the ad from most of its social media platforms over the weekend, though many people are understandably upset that the campaign was approved in the first place.
If you weren’t aware, a few weeks ago Converse, which is owned by Nike, released a new ad campaign that showed a woman wearing a white skirt holding a pair of Chuck Taylors. While it sounds innocuous, the lighting and framing of the image looked a lot like a Ku Klux Klan robe, with the shoes resembling a pair of hanging feet.
“We’re sorry,” Nike said in a statement, adding, “We understand why this image is deeply upsetting and recognize that we got this wrong. We removed it from our channels and are working to remove it everywhere it appeared.”
“As a Black man and someone who loves Converse shoes, I find this very insensitive and distasteful,” Kendall Peacock, who runs the Education Firm, a tutoring and mentorship program in Atlanta, said on social media. “Deliberate racist intent hasn’t been established yet, but that doesn’t erase the impact.”
Not everyone shared Peacock’s assessment of the image.
“Shadow, light, and composition. Every photographer can tell you, whoever did this ad knew EXACTLY what they were doing,” the Chicago-based photographer Stephanie Schwartz wrote on Threads on Thursday.
I saw the ad come up organically in my feed, and I had to do a double-take to understand what I was looking at because, y’all. At first glance, it looked pretty damn horrific.
As someone who does a lot of video work, I know how an image can lose its impact after looking at it hundreds of times before sending it out to the public. That said, the first time you see something you or your collaborators have made is generally impactful. That first review should’ve had at least one person in the room go “heyyyyyy, maybe we don’t use that one.”
Like, how are you a sneaker company and not a single Black person reviewed the campaign? How are you a sneaker company that’s largely maintained relevancy through Black creatives like Tyler, the Creator, and not thought, “hey, maybe this ain’t a good look.”
This honestly could’ve been avoided if the model simply didn’t hold the shoes, or if it was an overhead shot showing the shoes at each point of the star. Nike isn’t even one of the companies that got rid of its DEI initiatives, so I’m really at a loss as to how this happened.
Remember when sneaker ads either showed the shoe in use or were just silly fun? I really think marketing teams should look into bringing back those days, because if I had to choose between being seen as campy or horrifically racist, I’m going camp all day.
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