Nike, Adidas, and Human Stains
Given what happened nearly two years ago, we shouldn’t have been overly surprised by the commercial that Nike put out in the days following George Floyd’s tragic death in Minneapolis. The ad, which urged those watching to not make any more excuses for racism, came with the hashtag #UntilWeAllWin, but what really caught the eye was the fact that it was soon retweeted by Adidas, Nike’s closest competitor, with the message: “Together is how we move forward. Together is how we make change.”
Nike made itself powerful enemies, some of the them in the highest echelons of the US government, in the summer of 2018, when it featured Colin Kaepernick — the quarterback hounded out of the National Football League (NFL) for taking the knee during the national anthem — in a commercial with the message: “Believe in something. Even if it means sacrificing everything.”
The reaction to the most recent message has been nothing near like vitriolic as it was when Kaepernick’s face was front and centre, though that’s most likely because people are more preoccupied with streets burning across the nation. But by not sitting on the fence as most corporations prefer to do, both Nike and Adidas have come into the crosshairs of those who have convinced themselves that race isn’t a problem in 2020.
The blowback has been entirely predictable. Nike, Adidas and most other sporting goods manufacturers have a long and undistinguished history of utilising cheap labour in developing nations, and then selling their products at enormous profits. A shoe that cost less than $30 to make can potentially retail for $200 or more. Smart business for some, exploitation for others.
Other observers have pointed to the fact that there isn’t a single person of colour among Nike’s top executives. The same allegations have been levelled against the likes of LinkedIn and Netflix as well, after they too decided to take a stand on an issue that polarises a country of 320 million more than any other.
But are such arguments even valid? Are we now saying that individuals and corporations have to be perfect or beyond reproach to support what they view as a just cause? And if that’s the case, just where are these perfect people or firms? Should my inadequacies as a human being stop me from expressing support for what I believe in?
“We leave a stain, we leave a trail, we leave our imprint,” wrote the late Philip Roth in one of his wisest books. “Impurity, cruelty, abuse, error, excrement, semen — there’s no other way to be here. Nothing to do with disobedience. Nothing to do with grace or salvation or redemption. It’s in everyone. Indwelling. Inherent. Defining. The stain that is there before its mark.”
If you look at the history of civilisation, no one has escaped this human stain. Just consider the two most admired figures of the 20th century. Mahatma Gandhi was the apostle of non-violence, who inspired millions of others worldwide. He was also someone whose views on race, and especially black people, were especially problematic. Does the bad cancel out the good? Is it remotely fair to focus almost exclusively on the negative, as many have in recent years, and ignore his pivotal role in a freedom struggle like no other?
A generation after Gandhi’s death, Nelson Mandela became our most beloved secular saint, the man who made South Africa’s transition from the horrors of apartheid a lot less painful than it might otherwise have been. His first wife left him on the grounds of serial adultery, and the second — who had been one of the faces of the anti-apartheid movement while he was in jail — was asked to leave soon after his release from prison because of his disquiet over her personal life. Again, does the fact that Mandela ‘cheated’ diminish him, or tarnish what he did later in life? Or does it just make him human, like the rest of us?
The thing is, you can pick holes in any legacy, whether it’s an individual or a corporation. There isn’t a closet without skeletons in it. We’re only different when it comes to the nature of the skeletons. For some, they pertain to ‘sins of the flesh’. For other teetotallers who avoid such pitfalls, the skeleton is often their meanness of spirit and inability to empathise.
Nike’s history makes their recent choices especially interesting. Back in the late 1980s, the Spike Lee and Michael Jordan commercials did a lot to arrest declining sales. In 1990, Harvey Gantt, an African-American architect, stood for election to a US Senate seat from North Carolina, Jordan’s home state. His opponent was Jesse Helms, about whom The Washington Post once published an article titled “Jesse Helms, White Racist”.
Jordan was the subject of much criticism for not supporting Gantt’s candidature, though we don’t know to this day if there was any pressure from the head honchos at Nike. Whether there was or wasn’t, should we judge him? As Roth wrote: “There is truth and then again there is truth. For all that the world is full of people who go around believing they’ve got you or your neighbor figured out, there really is no bottom to what is not known.
“The truth about us is endless. As are the lies.”