![]() ![]() Disgraced sports commentator Jimmy “The Greek” Snyder once said, “The Black is a better athlete to begin with … They can jump higher and run faster.” Sports provide an easy cover for the perpetuation of this myth. For Black bodies – Jordan and Henry, but also athletes like Damar Hamlin, who suffered a near-fatal injury during an NFL game in early 2023 – heroism is articulated through the hypnotizing anthem of toil and exhaustion. John Henry, the legendary steel driver, was a hero, and so, too, is Jordan. This marketing ploy to shift the attention of consumers from mundane pockets of polyurethane to on-court performances, while indeed innovative, centers an incredibly old tradition of Americans seeing Black bodies as being spectacularly convertible to profit.Īir Jordans romanticize an American wistfulness for the stoic and branded Black workhorse. ![]() The first TV ad for Air Jordans features the iconic line, ‘Who says man was not meant to fly?’ In an interview with journalist Scoop Jackson, Bruce Kilgore, Nike designer responsible for the Air Force 1, articulated the difficulty of taking the air midsole from idea to execution to market: “How do you take something inherently unstable and put into that is all about stability?”īut six years after the development of the air midsole, David Falk cracked the code of Nike’s transparent, little black box: Don’t market the technology. ![]() The seemingly simple concept of explaining Air had eluded the company. People knew they loved the sensation of Air even though the “how” remained a mystery. But runners became enamored with the idea of a cushioning technology they couldn’t see and much less understand. They represent the literal molding of a Black man’s feet, with their vulcanized rubber, leather and laces encapsulating Black athletic greatness and cool.įinally figuring out how to sell Nike’s airbag technology was the other side of Air’s recipe for success. ![]() What “Air” does better than anything else is to unbox a provocative, sobering truth about Jordans’ meteoric rise: They are cast as literal extensions of Black bodies. In it, I argue that the Black body’s long history of objectification and commodification undergirds the branding, mass consumption and culture of sneakers. I’m writing a book that explores the intimate connections between sneakers and Blackness. Meanwhile, the Jordan brand, which was spun off into its own company in 1997, brings in billions of dollars per year, of which Jordan pockets 5%. Today, Nike is worth a staggering $200 billion. A year later, Nike sold US$100 million worth of Air Jordan shoes and apparel, boosting the company’s profits to $59 million from only $10 million the year before.Īfter 38 years and 37 iterations of their flagship line of basketball shoes, Jordans have become a transcendent cultural talisman memorializing Michael Jordan’s career and basketball’s influence on American life – but also, his labor. In 1985, Nike released the first Air Jordan sneaker. ![]()
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