rolling "Is This Racist?" thread

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

bottle *opener* episode, i think u know i meant.

Gob walks in with Franklin to top it off

Am I the only one who sees those silly-ass shoes as potentially racist, yet in a different racist context: ie. suggestive of those '80s "inner-city youth shot to death for his sneakers" incidents?

when i clicked on the thread i hopefully said "10 to 1" to myself -- not close, but 10 to 4 ain't bad either as far as vindicating my fun. hate
--here's my lumber, so jack me maybe (some dude)

I think it's a stretch to see these as racist or even particularly insensitive
--Love Max Ophüls of us all (Michael White)

Good call, Michael WHITE

Lol at Shipley post that I was gonna zing still in my iphone

has everyone still not absorbed the fact that intent doesn't matter

nearly every racist thing in this thread was created/started by an idiot who wasn't trying to be racist

getting to a certain point in your life -- like the point where you're a famous shoe designer or w/e -- and still lacking the foresight/knowledge/common sense to realize that sneakers with shackles on them are going to be received as 'offensive' only means you don't know a damn fucking thing about race/blackness in the modern world. no one should be forgiven for not even attempting to make themselves less stupid.

anyway, this

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KC2zbOwbeEs

sry oliver looks like 'yes' from the trailer (not that i'm gonna actually see it)

the juxtaposition between the innocent lilywhite damsel in distress and the maniacal googly-eyed salma + innocent cuddly romantic white pot growers, one of whom is extremely violent but in a way that would make him endearing (DOING IT FOR LOVE DAMMIT) fighting against the evil scary brown drug cartel who are also just stereotypes + actually using ironic cultural appropriation as a weapon + 'savages'

now obv there is a possibility that the movie attempts very hard to equate the two sides as equally 'savage'. (i'm guessing that's the case, and that it also sucks at making any of its points cogent or comprehensible.) but if the trailer is any indication, it still won't be able to make any point/commentary without still being fucked up about it. if nothing else, whoever cut the trailer (the selling point is 'come watch these keut whites take on evil latinos n save their black+white princess') did a fucked up job of it.

preposterous and awesome

zachlyon, are you incapable of understanding written English or did you just gloss over the big argument between pplains and me and do I need to point out again that telling the black dude how he should be responding to racism on the "is this racist?" thread is an interesting, drowning-in-irony choice

Point taken, but I'm still going to tell the black dude that he's way off on Family Guy.

lol

I would be sad if you didn't!

wait what

DJP i agree with everything you've said itt about the shoes and i don't think my post was directed @ any black dudes? just felt like it was worth reiterating that intent isn't the important thing here

is it just the difference between calling it racist and calling it fucked up, based on intent? was just saying that innocent intent doesn't excuse ignorance, not trying to compare it to the bottle opener or anything or add to that strain of the conversation at all. but i can see how it can be taken that way, so i'm sorry about that, wasn't my "INTEEEENT" to dispute your response.

DJP is "my favorite black man"

That post is already looking way too bad and I m still kind of tipsy. Shit.

LOVE YOU DAN

yeah DJP i didn't really understand why you went after zach there, didn't feel like he was telling you or anyone what to think

well maybe he shouldn't have started out his post with 'has everyone'

I just finished an argument with pplains where I said I was sure dude's intent wasn't racially motivated, which is why I think the shoes are not intentionally racist even though they present that way, so zach saying "how many times do we have to say intent doesn't matter, you should find this racist" sounded like a reiteration of pp's side of the argument to me

I apologize for the harsh reaction

My mistake, for the record, wasn't presuming that you should be offended, but presuming that you would be offended.

no need to apologize, i see it. i was sort of jumping over the convo there and responding to michael white et al saying that it wasn't offensive because scott wasn't trying to be offensive. i forgot that the guardian article at the beginning explicitly said that the implications were intentional.

My mistake, for the record, wasn't presuming that you should be offended, but presuming that you would be offended.

well really, the whole thought process that leads to someone making shackle shoes without thinking about what they'd look like on the target audience is one that makes me derisively laugh more than anything else

let's not forget the larger issue here -- jeremy scott makes really dumb clothes