Nike’s Hypocrisy in Casting Kaepernick

By ANTOINE WILEY ‘20

Nike just rolled out a controversial advertisement campaign marking the thirtieth anniversary of the its iconic “Just Do It” logo featuring Colin Kaepernick, the former star quarterback reviled and loved for his very public stances on police brutality and racial inequality in America. He’s probably most famous (or infamous, depending on who you ask) for kneeling during the national anthem before NFL games. Understandably, the public reaction to the campaign was highly polarized, one side condemning Nike for backing a staunchly unpatriotic and basely disrespectful hypocrite and the other side praising Nike for taking a stand of solidarity with a social justice martyr whose commitment to shedding light on racial inequality in America cost him millions of dollars and a roster spot in the NFL. Kaepernick's opposers even burned their Nike gear (please don’t do that, there are people that could actually use the clothing) and vowed to boycott all Nike products.

Regardless of where you fall in between the two poles, the Nike ad campaign is just another example of a giant corporation giving a frivolous effort to profit off of social justice movement appealing to millennials to increase sales. This campaign is simply Nike taking advantage of demographics; millennials are projected to be America’s largest living adult group by 2019, and millennials tend to be more urban, young, and liberal than their predecessors. They also form the backbone of Nike consumers, so it would only make sense to appeal to their leanings in an ad campaign. In fact a report done by Moosylvania, an agency specializing in corporate branding, found that Apple and Nike were the brands millennials loved most. As sports analyst Matt Powell put it, “Old angry white guys are not a core demographic for Nike.” The ad worked, as Nike’s stock hit $83.90 on Thursday, marking a new all time high for the stock’s price. Nike would have you think through its ad campaign that it not only stands for fighting racial inequality, but for taking a stand for human rights at large, and that it has a corporate culture with a strong social conscience. To a superficial extent it may, but at the end of the day Nike only really cares about turning out a profit, as all companies do. There’s obviously nothing innately wrong with this, but it’s highly misleading for a corporation to try and appeal to consumers by convincing them that they happen to really care about the same issues much of their customers care about. Were it the case that supporting Kaepernick would hurt Nike’s profits, there is no doubt that Nike wouldn’t hesitate in dropping Kaepernick.

It’s also somewhat ironic that a company with as awful a history of workers’ rights abuses as Nike is now portraying itself as a proponent of human rights. One has to wonder where this acute social conscience was when Nike-contracted sweatshops in Cambodia and Pakistan used child labor in the 90s, or when hundreds of workers fainted in sweatshops part of Nike’s supply chain in 2017 due to horrific working conditions with temperatures reaching 37 degrees Celsius, or any of the other countless cases where Nike seemed to regard its workers’ well-being with apathy. While Nike is far from the only company to have some ethics issues concerning its workers, and has taken steps to improve its workers’ conditions, many of its factories in Asia still suffer from much of the same issues they did decades ago when news stories first detailed the sweatshop nightmares so many Nike workers endure every day. A recent report by Nike investigating its factories found that only a mere 68% of its factories met its code of standards, which is a major improvement relative to a few years ago, but is still a long ways off from ideal. A corporation as profitable and massive as Nike is fully capable of ensuring that its workers work in decent conditions. This disparity makes it somewhat difficult for Nike to speak with credibility on social issues when they still consistently fail to ensure their own workers’ wellbeing. It’s important to hold the distinction between what companies claim to be and what companies actually are. It’s great that Nike is trying to brand itself as an advocate for equality and human rights, but it’s also worth noting that they’re not applying these principles to their workers, and however noble their ad campaign’s intentions may seem, it really comes down to money.