This is suicide awareness month. Black people are being found dead and hung in 2026. Why would you even THINK that would be appropriate? In any month,
This is suicide awareness month. Black people are being found dead and hung in 2026. Why would you even THINK that would be appropriate? In any month, but suicide awareness month!
There comes a point when an apology becomes part of the business model.
Release something offensive. Let people discover it. Let the screenshots travel. Let Black people explain the history, provide the context, argue with strangers, defend their reaction and turn the company name into a trending topic.
Then remove the offending material.
“We’re sorry.”
“We got this wrong.”
“We will do better.”
And everybody goes home.
Except the people who were used to generate the conversation.
Converse, We Have Been Here Before
Our history nor our present is an edgy mood board. We are human beings. Black people are allowed to remember. We are allowed to notice. We are allowed to say: we have seen too much to pretend we have seen nothing.
In September 2026, Converse pulled an advertisement featuring K-pop star Karina after viewers said its composition evoked two of the ugliest symbols in American racial history.
Karina was photographed wearing white and holding a pair of black Converse sneakers. The lighting created a long white triangular shape that viewers compared to a Ku Klux Klan hood. Below it hung the black shoes, which some viewers said resembled dangling feet in a lynching image.
Converse apologized. The company said it understood why the image was deeply upsetting, acknowledged that it had gotten the image wrong, removed it from its channels and promised to do better.
But another Converse image was soon circulating alongside it.
That advertisement, from a separate campaign, showed a man on a ladder with Converse shoes suspended at a tree branch. The combination was enough to deepen the outrage already underway.
Now we are supposed to have the same tired conversation.
Did they mean it?
I have another question.
Why is “sorry” still enough?
Black People Are Not Required to Begin at Zero Every Time
Black people should not have to reopen our wounds to teach corporations why the knife hurts. This is exhausting. We all should be tired of this together. You don’t even have to be Black to be fed up; just being a human being ought to be enough to make you good and tired of this.
Every racial controversy does not prove deliberate racial provocation. But Black people be required to erase everything we have already seen before evaluating what is in front of us.
H&M apologized after putting a Black child in a sweatshirt reading “Coolest Monkey in the Jungle.” The company removed the image and the garment after widespread condemnation.
Gucci apologized after selling a black balaclava-style sweater with a mouth opening and large red lips that was widely condemned as resembling blackface. The company described the controversy as a learning moment and promised greater attention to diversity.
And don’t get me started on imaging around Black women. That’s a favorite pinata.
Different companies. Different circumstances. Different creative teams.
But Black consumers keep getting handed some version of the same assignment.
See it. React to it. Explain why it is offensive. Teach the history. Argue that we are not imagining things. Watch the company apologize.
Then prepare to repeat the exercise when somebody else does it again. Because they will. Someone will.
That is not accountability. That is a loop.
Because underneath the marketing discussion is something more intimate: Black people seeing imagery connected to terror against our people, then being expected to debate whether we’re entitled to recognize what our own history taught us to recognize.
These Companies Know How Images Work
If Black people must explain the history every time, your apology has already asked too much of us. Hell, why leave it to Black people to keep explaining. Why don’t YOU do it? Step forward and give a full, detailed, documentary-style teaching on why this was a terrible thing to do.
This is the part where my patience runs thin.
Advertising is not somebody snapping a picture in the backyard and accidentally uploading it before dinner. These are professional industries built around understanding human attention.
People are paid to select the model, wardrobe, lighting, composition, cropping, typography, product placement and final image. People study what makes our eyes stop. Companies measure engagement down to clicks, impressions and conversions.
The entire profession exists because images communicate. Yet when an image produces an unmistakably ugly racial association, suddenly everybody wants us to believe images are terribly mysterious things.
Maybe somebody intended it. Maybe nobody intended it. What we do know is that the image made it through.
In the Converse case, the Associated Press asked how the company screens advertisements and how this particular image was approved. Converse declined to provide additional answers.
Now see that deserves attention. Because “we didn’t intend that” and “our systems repeatedly fail to recognize racial imagery before Black people have to point it out” are not the same defense.
The second one is also a problem.
And We Know Something Else About Modern Advertising
Attention has value. Outrage produces attention. A controversial advertisement can be screenshotted millions of times, discussed on television, debated across social media and written about by publications around the world.
People who never would have discussed a new pair of sneakers are suddenly saying the company’s name. That does not prove a particular company intentionally created racial outrage. But corporations understand the attention economy.
So the public is entitled to ask harder questions when provocative imagery repeatedly emerges from industries whose professionals are paid specifically to understand what makes people look.
Black people are also entitled to stop pretending every new controversy arrives without history. Pattern recognition may not be proof, but it is most definitely information.
Respect Cannot End at “We’re Sorry”
Black people, our communities, are not your unpaid racial sensitivity department.
This is where I want the conversation to change.
Suppose the company truly did make a terrible mistake. Hmm. Then repair it. Quickly.
If an advertisement evokes the history of lynching, put something substantial behind the apology.
- Fund scholarships for Black students.
- Make a significant contribution to Black schools.
- Support institutions preserving the history of lynching and racial terror.
- Fund Black historical archives.
- Invest in community organizations doing serious work.
- Hire independent reviewers to examine how the advertisement passed approval and publish what changes were made. (This is a potential remote position, an internship, a high school or college course assignment. Yes, I said high school. So far, I have more faith in their empathy and compassion for their fellow human beings. Corporations used to get input from business and marketing students. Did you stop?)
- Give people inside the company enough authority to stop something like this before Black consumers have to become the unpaid cultural review department.
(By the way, this entire practical and humane list are things people against diversity, equity, and inclusion hate.)
Do something that costs more than deleting a photograph. Because respect has a price. Not a punishment. A price.
If your company can spend enormous sums creating, distributing and promoting an advertising campaign, then repairing the damage should not consist primarily of somebody in communications opening a document and typing six careful sentences.
Respect does not ask the wounded community to do all the teaching while the wealthy institution keeps all the money.
The Apology Is Too Cheap
An apology without repair leaves the people who were hurt carrying the entire cost. Now how unequal and unfair is that?
This is the part corporate America needs to hear.
Black people’s pain cannot remain one of the least expensive mistakes a company can make.
The advertisement reaches millions.
Black people absorb the insult.
Black people recognize the history.
Black people explain the history.
Black people generate the discussion.
Black journalists cover it.
Black creators make videos about it.
Black consumers argue about it.
The company’s name travels farther than its marketing department could have carried it alone.
Then the company says sorry. No. The apology cannot keep closing the account.
Respect is not demonstrated by how beautifully a corporation apologizes after people are hurt. Respect is demonstrated by what it was willing to build beforehand, what it changes afterward, and what it is willing to give up to make repair real.
I don’t need another corporation to tell Black people that it has listened. Show us the receipt.
If the apology is sincere, there should be evidence left behind after the news cycle is gone.
At some point these corporations are going to have to volunteer to stop being ignorant. There comes a point when repeated ignorance stops paying for an automatic reset. If your mistake traveled around the world, your repair should not fit inside a social media caption.
Called Out of Our Names: When Did Respect Become Too Much to Ask? (audio ep) – WE Survive Abuse
Stay Woke: When a Warning is Turned to a Punchline – WE Survive Abuse