rolling "Is This Racist?" thread

None of my monster toys wore shackles.

http://cdn.necolebitchie.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/My-Pet-Monster.jpg

http://cdn.hypebeast.com/image/2009/10/adidas-originals-jeremy-scott-2010-preview-7.jpg

http://images.partyamerica.com/images/products/en_us/detail/P445596_dt.jpg

ha, who could conceivably stand behind that

Why do shackles remind one of the slave trade more than of just any pre-19th century prison?

Also, those 'shackles' don't look so comfortable.

when people think of prisons in the US the first thing that comes to mind is the staggeringly disproportionately imprisoned black population, if I had to hazard a guess

it's not so much "shackles" as it is "shackles on basketball shoes, equipment for a sport currently dominated by black men" that is evoking the slavery imagery

I just see basketball players, they could be black, white, purple like "my favorite monster"...

I think it's a stretch to see these as racist or even particularly insensitive but I can see the consumerist angle and there might be some patronizing 'kids killing each other over Air Jordans' tired shit going on. Over all, my response is 'meh'; not remotely interested in them and I don't trust the man's aesthetic all that much. That urban toreador look above seems a little desperate.

purple like "my favorite monster"...

lol

Yeah, the intent could be totally innocent* (I think it is). Not racist, but a weird example where the external context does all the heavy lifting and flips perception.

*in no way satorially innocent

^r

"No, no, we're not here because of the racism claims. We're just the fashion police. Hands behind your back!"

if these were marketed as basketball shoes i would better understand that association but these are definitely hype streetwear? btw i immediately thought of my pet monster

This is basically "not racist but COME ON"

yeah i'm really not trying to minimize anybody's reaction to what they find offensive about these shoes but i kinda see this as a natural progression in the work of a kooky designer who has been putting massive cartoon wings on sneakers for a while now

this goes back to one's ability to edit IMO

like, sure this design makes sense in the context of the Jeremy Scott aesthetic, but what are these shoes going to look like when 17 year old black teen puts them on (ans: just as stupid as it did when JS put it on, with added unpleasant, unintended overtones)

maybe if the shackle wasn't completely superfluous-looking to the rest of the shoe, like say if it was actually attached to the opening of the shoe and served as a final fastener to keep the shoe on rather than as a decorative piece with a long ass chain on the back, it wouldn't have evoked as negative a reaction

If your feathers were a little lighter, I'd say you were thinking too hard on this.

"What if the shackles on the shoe commonly worn by African-American athletes were created from a puffy silver band found at the top of the shoe, above the laces? Then maybe only spacemen from Mars and stardust explorers would be the only ones offended. "

What if we just didn't market athletic shoes with shackles in the first place.

Are you selectively reading here or were you just jonesing so hard to tell the black dude how he should react to something with racial overtones that you're skipping over the points where I am saying "regardless of intent, it shouldn't have been a surprise to anyone that these shoes would cause an uproar"?

Agree. The mental connections from sports shoes to black men, and from chains to slavery, are pretty damn short hops that were bound to occur.

I can't beleive you just used the verb 'to bind', Aimless!

first time i've ever heard "short hops" and "black men" in relationship to basketball shoes, am i right?
hah?
hah?
tough crowd.

lol

I'm not out to tell anyone how they should think or whether they're wrong. I will say that if some white guy on one of these college football boards had something like "maybe the shackle was in the wrong place on that Adidas", I wouldn't have hesitated to say ARE YOU NUTS?

I'm not jonesing and I'm certainly not questioning your judgement or where you're coming from on this. Maybe my reaction is a bit too strong, especially since I've never walked any miles in your shoes. But I have to be honest, I would have let loose on anybody else without pause.

So is this the rough analog to the yellow-star urban outfitters shirt discussed in the anti-semitism thread?

I mean, as a guy in his late 30s who has no exposure to this designer and has never seen this purple monster toy (stop it), not having any context to go on leans me more into the wtf racist shoe reaction than o rly.

Those shoes are hideous. They make Reebok Pumps look like something Michael White would wear to a gallery opening.

It still seems weird and condescending to me to let loose on someone who has already agreed that the shoes evoke problematic imagery and is explicitly saying "he probably wouldn't have had this reaction if the shackle hadn't looked so much like a shackle" in a conversation with someone else talking about the fashion inspiration of the purple monster toy and the execution of vision involved in this shoe.

like, of all the posters on this messageboard, am I AT ALL the one most likely to barrel into a discussion of racial issues with no concern or care for the sensitivity of the subject? does that fit my posting pattern at all?

No, of course not.

I apologize if I was cherry picking some of the posts, but "not racist BUT COME ON" really jumped out at me. I'd say this product appears more racist than the bottleopener.

Context, intent, it all looks different depending on who's looking at it.

one suspects the designer did it because he knew it would get him a boatload of publicity, and consequently bring him to the attention of a very widely scattered and difficult to reach set of customers, who don't give a shit about the racism aspect of these shoes, but care only for their ownoutlandish, preening sense of fashion. the haha my pet monster story was just to give him a bit of cover against being beaten up in the street.

fwiw, I think the shoes are hilarious and would have been awesome if I were a child or a clubber. grrr my shoes are trying to get away from me oh no!!!

but, I mean, it's pretty eye-rollingly hilarious that no one who had anything to say about those shoes going to market saw this coming. I want to be in that bubble. It seems like a happy place!

if these shoes cut down on traveling in the NBA i'm all for it

one suspects the designer did it because he knew it would get him a boatload of publicity

nope.

Karma repaid my snarkiness when I went on a GIS for "sock garters" and regretted not putting the safe search mode on.

I think you misunderstood how I meant "not racist but COME ON".

What I meant was "I believe Jeremy Scott was inspired by My Pet Monster when he created this thing, therefore I believe the intent behind them was not racist. However, how the hell did he sketch the design and get a prototype made without considering any of the wider societal connotations around young black kids with shackles around their ankles?"

This is a terrible idea for a product because of the complete tone-deafness to cultural imagery and how what he did inadvertently evoked a colorful rainbow-hued vision of slavery. I have no doubt in my mind that it was intended to be an homage to a harmless monster toy, however. The Ronaldinho bottle opener explicitly was made to celebrate and emphasize a dark-skinned man's giant buck teeth, which is way way WAY more in line with the inspiration behind similarly-themed racist iconography of black people. There's no long tradition of making offensive shoes that denigrate black people for these ugly-ass sneakers to fall into or resemble, so I don't really get how they come across as instantly more offensive than the bottle opener.

bottle opener -> kind of racist but not willfully

shoes -> not racist but probably 100% likely to be put into contexts where they seem like a weird racist thing and if anyone had figured that out and still made them, wtf

I'd strike the "but not willfully" but otherwise OTM

I guess if it's "haha that dude has large teeth" it's more being a dick about his personal appearance, but it's hard to divorce them from "he has large teeth, which is a common thing and a racial characteristic"

it's all racism, yeah

"these shoes are ridiculous AND offensive, this fashion designer is clearly trolling for publicity" is mmmaybe crediting too much intent to what i suspect was nothing more than a potentially controversial product sailing through a huge cultural blind spot on its way to market

jeremy scott is not generally known for subtlety, if he was going to explore racial imagery you'd probably get a lot more overt stuff than orange plastic shackles.

ha this is true, there would probably have been a matching necklace that looked like a noose

I would have said the bottleopener wasn't as racist due to our good friend, Mr. Ignorance. Just like the Britishes who I don't believe are racist or prejudiced didn't quite get the American discomfort of that particular product, I can only assume that the bottleopener's creator was making a goofy caricature of a black athlete without fucking using his head first. Perhaps the intent wasn't racist, but the result was. At least it wasn't done for a box of cornbread.

But this Jeremy Scott fella leapfrogged over the caricature motif and right into the very symbol of slavery. And not with a bottle opener or a monster costume, but with athletic shoes made by a brand that focuses on the most African-American dominated sport in this nation. If that dude really was all "hee hee, aintcha heard of the purple monster?", I would have been all "sure I have. How about you wear those to the Juneteenth celebration and I just follow you at a safe distance with this camcorder?"

I can see these shoes being designed by Buster in an episode of Arrested Development.

Michael, who is at a bar with a journalist, trying to explain away a recent racist outburst by Lucile, looks up at the TV to see Gob announcing this new line of 'shackle shoes', with buster giggling in the background, playing with his my-pet-monster-inspired shoes. Zoom in on journalists open-mouthed expression. Zoom in of Michael making oh no face. "You're probably not going to believe me when I tell you that there is a perfectly innocent explaination for these shoes."

ha the bottle episode was like a game of race telephone between the UK, US and Brazil which (afaik) are the three most racially dicked-over societies on earth