This episode deals with the controversy over the Adidas “shackle sneakers.”
Ill Doctrine is a video blog on music, politics and culture, launched in 2007 by Jay Smooth. We will be premiering two episodes a week on ANIMAL. Older episodes can be found at IllDoctrine.com and you can follow Jay on Twitter here.
Enough with this guy already! Your about as black as Andrew Dice Clay. It's always these guys with the tiniest peace of black in them that hold on to and squeeze the shit out of it. Black people don't even talk like that. Your trying way too hard and it's probably pretty embarrassing to people who are close to you. I don't know what's worse, you or all the gay shit that's been popping up on this site. Actually I definitely would rather watch your rants then some shit about dudes dressed like the village people. Bring back ANIMAL NEW YORK!!!! This is some wack homo-hybrid bullshit.
^^ Now THERE's a troll for you. LOL!!
I LOVED how you tore down the utter irrelevance of "intentions." You ask a valid question: how the hell did this shoe idea ever get past the first draft? Answer: By design. Because what's ironic is that those marketers also considered the designer's intentions irrelevant. It's not that people in the room didn't KNOW the correlation of shackles to slavery, it's that they dismissed its importance due to the "offended group" only comprising a percentage of a demographic that only accounts for 12% of the population. That is, until they learned that the OTHER 88% of the population saw those bands as shackles too and said no thanks.
IOW, if the criticism had only been lodged from, say, members of the NAACP, Adidas would have these shoes on the shelves right now.
Wow, way to not only not to act homophobic, but to also pretend like you're the ultimate arbiter of how black people talk or who is and isn't "black" considering that "blackness" has nothing to do with anything objective like genetics and is simply an arbitrary cutoff in terms of a spectrum of skin-colors it's completely idiotic for you to be saying who and what is and isn't "black"