Trump’s immediate response to the ad was to tweet, “What was Nike thinking?” Later, on “Fox & Friends,” he said: “I don’t like what Nike did. I don’t think it’s appropriate. I honor the flag. I honor our national anthem.”
The media response was to initially show examples of people destroying their Nike gear or calling for boycotts of the company. The consumer response, however, was vastly different. Nike reported a more than 30 percent increase in sales since the release of the ad, which has been viewed over 16 million times on YouTube.
Many have applauded Nike for its supposed courage and willingness to assume great financial risk by making such an ad. The company’s decision to make the ad, however, was a cold and calculated business move.
Kaepernick has been under contract with Nike since 2011. During the 2016 season, when Kaepernick began his protests, Nike did not market him. Despite that, because of his protests, Kaepernick’s jersey became the league’s number one seller that season, and his jersey sales remained in the top 50 last year even though he was not on a team.
The company’s decision to make the ad, however, was a cold and calculated business move.
In recognition of the widespread support for Kaepernick, as well as the increasing social opposition within a wide section of the population—particularly among young people, who comprise the company’s primary demographic group—Nike has chosen to monetize social discontent and utilize it as a central component of its new marketing strategy. The company is confident that this strategy will not only increase it sales, but also result in attracting other major athletes to sign Nike endorsement deals.
An unintended irony of Nike making Kaepernick the face of its new marketing campaign is that it has occurred only months after the NFL agreed to extend for another eight years its partnership with the company.
This new agreement announced last March allows Nike to continue to be the official supplier of NFL uniforms and sideline gear through the 2028 season. While financial terms were not disclosed, Nike is likely paying more than the $1.1 billion it reportedly paid when it originally secured exclusive NFL apparel rights in 2012.
Consequently, the NFL’s 32 owners, most of whom are billionaires, including supporters and personal friends of Trump, now get to constantly see on TV, courtesy of their sponsor Nike, the face of the man they consider responsible for disrupting and damaging their multi-billion dollar business and who is now suing them for blacklisting him.
— source http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2018/09/10/foot-s10.html 10 Sep 2018
Amira Rose Davis talking:
Now Colin, like you said, has been blackballed by the league, so, on one hand, this is a way for him to continue making money. Nike gave a huge donation to his Know Your Rights campaign. It actually echoes back to 1968, when Tommie Smith and John Carlos did their protest facing blackball and not a lot of employment opportunities. It was actually Puma who stepped up and supported them and gave them contracts. So there is definitely a history here.
I think some of the trepidation on the part of people who support Kaepernick and are wary about capitalism’s intersection with athletic activism is: How does this change the game? How does this change the parameters of his protest? Does it reduce it to, you know, an act of resistance is now buying Nikes? Nike has definitely gone out of its way to appear to position itself against the NFL, announcing this campaign mere days before kickoff, buying an ad slot during the Thursday night kickoff opening game of this season, but there is no way that Nike and the NFL are rivals. In fact, they have a contract together through 2028. And so, the positioning of it has been certainly interesting.
I will be watching to see the way Colin is able to kind of move forward with this brand ambassadorship. But I think the thing with Nike, and one of the things even connected to Serena that we have to be mindful of, is that while, on one hand, there is this kind of fear that this is going to somehow mute Colins’s activism, and certainly we’ve seen many corporations think that protest has been profitable—this is Pepsi’s failed commercial, for instance, or the proliferation of Che Guevara shirts—the idea that we can commodify resistance in some way. And I think, yes, it’s along the lines of that. But as you pointed to, it covers up a lot of problems with Nike as a corporation. They have obviously had a long history of slave labor, child labor in developing countries.
When Michael Jordan was at the height of his career as their brand ambassador—”Be Like Mike” was everywhere—other NBA player Craig Hodges was very persistent in saying, “Hey, we should boycott Nike because of the conditions of their sweatshops. And more than that, we should create our own shoe company and sell it back to the black community and do it like that.” And Michael Jordan was very hesitant to speak out politically. And Craig Hodges, after being so politically active and continuing to call for a Nike boycott, found himself out of the league and not picked up in free agency when he was still in part of his prime career.
And so I think there is this kind of duality to the corporation that has this history on one hand, and also put out some of the first ad campaigns geared to getting girls into sports, if you remember the “If You Let Me Play” commercial from the ’90s which was really formative in encouraging young girls to get into athletics. But just this past week, they released an ad down in Mexico featuring Mexican women Olympians running through the streets of Mexico navigating sexism and overcoming it, boxing it away, flipping over it. And this is part of their “Just Do It” campaign, as well. And I think it’s interesting, because it comes on the heels just mere months out from a massive report about sexism in the upper echelons of Nike that has resulted in the ouster of many top Nike officials and has a forthcoming lawsuit from women who feel like they’ve been targets of sexism and sexual harassment within the corporation. And so, while they’re filming this video in Mexico, they might as well have also filmed it in their boardroom, apparently, and filmed their female execs running through trying to navigate the sexism there. So, I think there is that duality to it.
And lastly, to wrap it up, to bring it back to Serena, it’s interesting because on the other side of things, in the gendered look of it, one of the reasons Serena is able to have a platform and speak out forcefully, whether it’s about sexism in tennis or police brutality or whatnot, is because she has—she’s one of the few women with a large endorsement deal like that, compared to, for instance, WNBA players, who have been persistently and consistently talking about police brutality and kneeling for the anthem and shutting down press conferences, saying, “We won’t take any question unless it deals with police brutality.” And they’ve been subject to fines. They’ve been, you know, under the radar. Their salaries are already very paltry. A lot of them have to play overseas to even compensate it.
So, while there’s a lot of anxiety around how this will somehow mute or water down Kaepernick’s protest, on the other hand, it is Nike’s endorsement of Serena that gives her the platform to be kind of unapologetic and speak out as she wants to.
On one hand, I’m trying to uncover the people we don’t know, the longer history of black women’s athletics, from the start of the 20th century, and there is a very long and vast history there. I’m also trying to reconstruct the idea of people we might only know their names–Althea Gibson, Wilma Rudolph, for instance. And these women, like Serena, took on a life of their own as a symbol. They were used to promote ideas about citizenship, to—you know, Alice Coachman was the first black woman to have an endorsement deal by Coca-Cola in 1952, and her image was used to refute Soviet propaganda that the United States—during the Cold War, that the United States didn’t treat black people well. And so, there’s a way that their images as athletic black women living the American dream have been used certainly to promote ideas about citizenship and about the nation.
But on the other hand, they also have been sites where you see all this anxiety around policing black bodies, policing bodies of women, have come to bear, whether it’s what they’re wearing on the field or how they can be feminine and mix that with playing a sport. And so there’s a lot of anxiety around how they wear their hair. A coach I profile, Coach Temple, for instance, wouldn’t let his track girls talk to reporters until they had powdered their face and pressed their hair after a race, had to play up their heterosexual inclinations.
So, on one hand, what I’m looking at is this long history of black girls and women who played the game, but also the box drawn around them and how they were able to play and what they had to do, how they had to contain themselves in order to be seen as respectable. And certainly that conversation is echoing all around us today in the wake of this controversy.
I think the other part of my book that I’m looking out for is rethinking Title IX. Certainly one of the things that I profile is the vast opportunities in athletics for black girls and women before what we commonly have come to think of, the sporting revolution. And I think that one of the things that happens in the wake of Title IX is that these black programs at historically black colleges and universities start having resources taken away as they can’t recruit against schools with larger budgets. It mirrors essentially what happens to black college football after integration. So there’s a few stories here, but certainly there’s echoes of them all around us today, and I’m constantly like, “Oh, longer epilogue!”
– Jim Crow era, black women athletes
I’ve talked a lot over the last year of a woman named Rose Robinson, who was a high jumper and ran track in Chicago. And one of the reasons she’s of note is because she, at the Pan Am Games, refused to stand for the national anthem. Later, although being tapped by the State Department to go on a kind of ambassador tour, she refused to do so, saying, “I don’t want to be a political pawn in your game and your attempt to sell a bill about America that I don’t believe to be true.” And this is an early aspect of athletic activism.
And then somebody like Wyomia Tyus, whose book Tigerbelle just came out last week, which is a memoir that everybody should go check out. And she has certainly a big story to tell. She was a track star in ’64 and ’68, first person—black, white, male or female—to go back to back in the 100 meters as a gold medalist. She is a track and field legend. And one of the things that Tyus allows us to access is what it was like to grow up not only in the Jim Crow South but at this dominant program headed by Coach Temple down at Tennessee State.
And certainly one of the reasons why we might know Tyus’s name is she was a member of that famous 1968 track and field team down in Mexico City, and her protest has been kind of understated in the wake of Tommie Smith and John Carlos. Certainly their protest overshadowed everybody else’s. But one of the things she did was wear black protest shorts. She and her fellow teammates dedicated their medals to Tommie and John after the race to stand in solidarity with them and their protests. And so, that is a very interesting story, and I profile her in my work, as well, and look at her, both her career as a Tigerbelle and her post-Olympic career, when we look at black women navigating, trying to create professional opportunities for athletics, as we move into the latter part of the ’60s and the 1970s.
So, Wyomia Tyus, her book Tigerbelle is out now. Rose Robinson certainly is one of the earliest activist athletes that we can think of. And I think it’s important to use those stories, along with names we might be more familiar with—Wilma Rudolph and Althea Gibson—who broke color barriers, color line barriers, but to think about: How does that trouble our understanding or deepen our understanding of the long history of athletic activism in this country and the long history of black women as athletes?
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Amira Rose Davis
assistant professor of history and women’s, gender and sexuality studies at Penn State University and co-host of the sports podcast Burn It All Down.
— source democracynow.org