For an hour or so a few weeks ago, there seemed to be a fad of burning one's Nike shoes because…well, it never made a whole lot o' sense and I wonder if all the shoe-burners were clear on the concept. Somewhere online, I found this explanation which raises as many questions as it answers…
A day after Nike unveiled their new "Just Do It" ad campaign featuring former NFL player Colin Kaepernick, several Americans shared photos and videos of them burning Nike products in protest. Kaepernick, a former quarterback for the San Francisco 49ers, gained attention for taking a knee during the American anthem in the 2016 NFL season. He was protesting against the way the state police treated people of color. Since then, he kneeled in protest in several other games.
It has always struck me that the folks who are irate over players "taking a knee" are deliberately misrepresenting the protesters' statement to make it more attackable and less defensible. They're taking a protest that's clearly defined as being against the way some police departments mistreat minorities and reframing it as "Those players are showing disrespect for the flag and all those who have fought for it in our armed forces." It's a lot easier to whip up hatred of the protesters for the latter than for the former.
And when we make it about shoes, we're really changing the subject from the issue that this is all about: Police mistreating minorities. They really don't want to talk about that.
But wait. It gets sillier. And more off that topic…
Back when Donald Trump was President-Elect Trump, the folks who make New Balance shoes showed some support for him, mainly because he was promising to cancel the Trans Pacific Partnership, which had been championed by the Obama administration. This is not exactly a hard-right position. There's reason to believe that President Hillary Clinton or President Bernie Sanders would have done much the same thing. From what I can gather though, some of the shoe-burners — angry at Nike for treating Colin Kaepernick as the kind of hero you feature in advertising — vowed to henceforth buy only New Balance because (a) New Balance has made like 98% of their shoes in America and (b) they backed Trump.
(b) seems like an exaggeration to me but I'm all for (a). I've been wearing nothing but New Balance shoes now for close to forty years and the "Made in America" reason is a big one. Remember back when the news was full of footage of President William Jefferson Clinton out jogging? He was always wearing New Balance running shoes, possibly because he liked them as much as I do, probably because they were the only shoes he could wear without risk of reporters noting, "The president was wearing shoes made in Bangla Desh by eight-year-olds being paid a nickel a day."
Honestly though, a more important reason I wear New Balance is that I think they make real good shoes and my feet like them.
They're odd feet — so odd they might have kept me out of the Army had I been drafted. From about age 10 until I was about 27, I had to wear special shoes that cost a lot and didn't last long. They were only available as one model of leather dress shoes so that's what I had to wear all the time, including in gym class or when engaging in exercise or sports. Only two or three stores in all of Los Angeles sold them.
There were two good things about shopping at the one we went to, one being that they gave out March of Comics giveaways. My father (and later, I) was shelling out tons of cash for my shoes but at least they came with free hard-to-otherwise-procure comic books.
And the other was that I was buying shoes from real experts; not some kid who was in his second week working at a Foot Locker because he got fired from Hot-Dog-on-a-Stick.
One day around 1979, one of those experts did some re-examining and then said that a kind of athletic shoe they carried might work fine on my feet. I said, "When I was ten, I was told I couldn't wear athletic shoes."
He said, "That was probably correct…then. But your feet have changed and so have athletic shoes. They now have more structure and sole support and they're much, much better made." The best, he said, was the one brand his store stocked — New Balance. I tried on a pair, they felt fine and after a few weeks of them feeling fine, I bought two more pairs and abandoned forever the expensive leather ones. In fact, I abandoned the stores with the experts because New Balance shoes were much cheaper at other shops.
The other day I was in my bank and a lady customer spotted my New Balance shoes and asked, about 90% jokingly, "Are you a White Supremacist?" I did a double-take that would have been over-the-top on The Benny Hill Show and asked her to explain. It seems she read online somewhere that since Nike has shown themselves as unAmerican by lionizing Mr. Kaepernick…and New Balance had demonstrated its patriotism (albeit for business reasons) by backing Mr. Trump on something…and since there are no other shoe companies in the world except those two…
…well, of course. New Balance shoes are the official shoe of White Supremacists anywhere. A bit of Googling shows that some of this has been going around for a while, even before the whole Kaepernick thing. The rest of a man may be covered by a sheet but you can always identify a racist by his New Balance shoes.
I don't think I'm a racist. I can't recall a single moment in my life when I treated anyone differently or had the slightest fear of anyone because they weren't Caucasian. My best male friend is Hispanic. My lady friend is black and one before her was, as well. When I've been in hiring positions, I've hired folks of all races and genders. But I do like these shoes I'm wearing at the moment, the ones which have a big "N" on the sides.
To steal an oft-said line from Donald Trump and others, I don't have a racist bone in my body. But apparently, that doesn't include my feet.