Nike pulls sneakers with ‘Betsy Ross’ American flag

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You probably went against the wrong planet rules by attacking "white Americans"

to the topic at hand while what the baseball team did is childish trolling for the vast majority of its history and for the vast majority of people the "Betsy Ross flag" has not been a racist symbol.

Evidence the Betsy Ross Flag was flown by confederate soldiers



https://www.huffingtonpost.com.au/2015/ ... 39788.html

That's not the Betsy Ross flag in the image. Nothing was even mentioned in that article link that suggested such.

OMG, they're flying the racist Betsy Ross flag in France! It's everywhere!!

Nike is doing it wrong.

I don’t mean the shoemaking, though that thing with Zion Williamson was pretty bad, I have to say.

No, Nike is doing it wrong because it managed to do something that all the neo-Nazis, Klansmen, alt-righters and other denizens of the lowest coprophagic phylum of our political life could never do: It turned the Betsy Ross flag into a racist symbol.

The thing is, most Americans — and when I say most, I mean, like, nearly all of them — had no idea white supremacists were doing this. In countless news stories, reporters contacted experts who either didn’t know about it or were only vaguely aware that this is one of the things these groups like to wear as capes during dress-up time.

If all these historians didn’t know [the relationship between white supremacy and the Betsy Ross flag], then Nike shouldn’t be expected to know it,” Mary Beth Norton, an American history professor at Cornell University, told CNBC.

Nonetheless, it’s true that if you search through enough old photos of Klan rallies and neo-Nazi pageants, you can spot a Betsy Ross flag from time to time.

Do you know what else you can probably spot if you look long and hard enough? Nike sneakers. Does that make Nikes symbols of white supremacy?

Of course not. But what if these groups started wearing T-shirts with the Nike “swoosh” on them?

Frankly, I think it would be a brilliant move by these hate groups to do just that. Nike would freak out, giving these attention-seekers a bonanza in free publicity.

Innocuous or even noble symbols can be appropriated for evil purposes. The swastika is an ancient symbol in various Asian cultures. It was adopted in Europe as a symbol of good luck until the Nazis made it their own. The KKK’s pointy hoods may have been inspired by the Catholic capirote of medieval Spain and Portugal, which looks dismayingly similar.

But here’s the thing: When evil people acquire symbols for their own ends, the only guarantee of success is when everyone else validates the acquisition.

If Nike had gone ahead with the special-edition sneakers, it would have been, in marketing terms, the equivalent of Godzilla versus Bambi. A few neo-Nazis and a few more social justice warriors would have complained, and everyone else would have gone about their day totally unconcerned.

Insted, Nike followed the advice of a man whose business model is to stir grievance and controversy for its own sake. Suddenly, millions of people who once thought the Betsy Ross flag was just an admirable bit of Americana now associate it with hate groups. Worse, other entirely decent and patriotic Americans will now likely start brandishing the flag to offend people who, until recently, had no idea some hate groups adopted the flag in the first place.

The ranks of the perpetually offended will misread this trolling-to-own-the-libs effort as an endorsement of hate speech, and the culture war will have yet another idiotic fight on its hands, and a symbol of the country’s founding that should be a uniting image for all Americans will now be reduced to a weapon in that war.

Thanks a lot, Nike.

Few things are more American than a giant company’s efforts to turn a profit off a patriotic emblem — and then seeing the product flare into a cultural bonfire just in time for the Fourth of July. But if the debate over Nike’s hasty decision not to release a shoe featuring the Betsy Ross flag has become hopelessly tangled, unknotting it should lead us to one conclusion: We shouldn’t be so quick to capitulate when racists try to taint symbols of our national story.

The story would have made headlines under any circumstances, coming as it does in the middle of a resurgent cultural war. But it gained special currency because of the involvement of one of the most prominent figures in our ongoing conflict over sports, patriotism and the role that big business plays in both.

Overnight, a threadbare piece of American mythology became both a symbol of white nationalism and a treasured icon of American patriotism.

Those who support Nike’s decision largely do so on the grounds that, because a small number of people have imparted their own noxious meaning to a well-known symbol, that symbol is now irrevocably tainted.

Reclaiming symbols isn’t easy in a moment when everything from the hand signal for “okay” to a cartoon frog can be corrupted. But what if, in a well-meaning effort to deny white supremacists lulz and comfort, we’ve ceded territory to them instead? If everything they express affection for is verboten, we’re denying ourselves the pleasures ranging from a cold glass of milk with a cookie to the music of Taylor Swift. And if we accede whenever racists try to taint a symbol with other preexisting associations, we’re consenting to the spread of poison rather than delivering vigorous antidotes on the spot.

Instead of engaging in cultural and historical cleansing, we need to learn how to reconsecrate what we value.

A person who desecrates an object that holds meaning for a large group of people can do harm both to that object and to the people who care about it, but the story doesn’t have to end there. Attacks on mosques, for example, cost congregations substantial amounts of money as they try to clean and rebuild their sacred spaces, and they cause real fear and anxiety within Muslim communities. But the people who desecrate sacred spaces don’t get the final say over what those spaces mean. That belongs to the people who visit every day or every week to reaffirm their values.

The same can be true for secular symbols. There’s a reason that Stanley Forman, then a photojournalist for the Boston Herald American, titled his iconic photo of a white teenager appearing to stab at a black lawyer with the American flag at the height of Boston’s bitter fight over school integration “The Soiling of Old Glory.” What Joseph Rakes, the teenager, tried to do to Ted Landsmark, the lawyer, would have been obscene no matter his choice of weapon. And in appearing to turn the flag into a spear, Rakes did violence to the idea of the flag itself in a way that compounded the viciousness of the attack.

But Rakes didn’t get to determine what the flag means for everyone. As Landsmark told NPR in 2016, he believes that while “very heinous things” have been done under cover of the flag, it still can be used in ways that speak to “what we want to be as opposed to what we sometimes have been.”

Both Nike’s partisans and those lining up to condemn the company missed an opportunity. We shouldn’t just roll over when racists try to poison a broadly accepted symbol. And the best way to fight for the values you believe that symbol represents isn’t to stitch it on a sneaker.

I have never in my life heard of the Betsy Ross flag being linked to racism.
All this stupid squabbling over an old flag distracts from the real issues of racism.Like not getting hired for a job because of your color or getting shot in the back by a gun ho cop.

All this stupid squabbling over an old flag distracts from the real issues of racism.Like not getting hired for a job because of your color or getting shot in the back by a gun ho cop.