A Black Predator is Okay, but Not a Black Monkey

Angela Rye shared a picture yesterday of a black male staring ferociously into the camera against a black background. He is in black and white, and underneath his image reads "PREDATOR; Master Control." In the right-hand corner of the ad is the Adidas logo. She captioned the photo with this:

“And now @adidas… this is devastating. à a lot of you are defending this ad by saying the soccer player pictured wears this line of cleats. Where’s the shoe? Do you understand that PREDATOR has a negative connotation particularly when we are talking about the perception of Black people in the world? This is irresponsible and NOT well thought out.”

Many comments on Rye’s Instagram page were in agreeance with the activist and her stance on the ad. Plenty of others, down at The ShadeRoom, disagreed. Majority of the comments emphasized how they felt that Rye’s commentary was a reach and that she was trying too hard to force the same racially charged error that H&M made. I strongly disagree. This ad from Adidas was distasteful as well, but here’s the difference. I’m not going to be up in arms about it. If I choose to boycott Adidas, it’ll be a conscious choice that I make. I don’t need to blast a multimillion dollar corporation on social media.

I would never boycott though, I love their sneakers, and you wouldn’t either and that’s why this ad isn’t as notorious as others.

I’ve been reading through a few of the comments, and one of them truly made me understand this entire phenomenon. “The shoe is represented on his face,” a commenter wrote in response to Rye’s question of the placement of the shoe in the ad, “I honestly feel that with this case you needa think outside of the block a little nah?” It all became very clear. Marketing needs to act in the realm of customer product knowledge.

I had NO IDEA, that the print on the guy’s face was in reference back to the print on the shoe. I didn’t even know the ad was about a shoe, beyond the fact that the Adidas logo was there. I didn’t know that the man featured, Paul Pogba, was a soccer player – I didn’t know who he was at all. This was unknown to me so, just as Rye felt when seeing the ad, I was a bit upset by the image.

Just like everyone who is angry about the “Coolest Monkey in the Jungle” sweatshirt. But I’m sure they didn’t know that it was a part of a trend about jungle animals. There are monkeys all over the garments. There are animal costumes that go along with it. If they would’ve put the black boy in the iguana outfit and tossed him online, everyone would be mad that he was dressed up in a COSTUME instead of outfits like the little white boys. Was he not good enough to get a real outfit?

What’s more important here is the discussion of what is upsetting about these marketing tactics that they use. We are upset because Black people used to be called monkeys (due to lack of intelligence, cleanliness, etc.) by white people during slavery, the Jim Crow era, and beyond – it is an insult. To put a black boy in a shirt that labels him the “coolest monkey” is highly offensive because it’s using a racial slur.

I am upset with Adidas because of the negative connotation that the word has in association with how Black people are viewed. Does anyone remember when Hillary Clinton coined the term super-predators? Start at around 0:58.

It might be a reference that was too long ago for many to remember but the First Lady, at that time, spoke of her husband’s anti-crime agenda for the inner-city saying, “We also have to have an organized effort against gangs, just as in a previous generation we had an organized effort against the mob. We need to take these people on. They are often connected to big drug cartels, they are not just gangs of kids anymore. They are often the kinds of kids that are called “super-predators”—no conscience, no empathy. We can talk about why they ended up that way, but first, we have to bring them to heel.”

Ouch. Part of me believes that some Black people held a real grudge for about 20 years on that one. Part of me believes that this statement is why she’s not the nation’s first president. But that’s another topic for another day.

The stigma that was created from that stuck with Black people from all walks of life. Labelling black kids as predators made the MORE of a target for police aggression and harassment; they might as well have labeled them prey.

Instead of making false claims to boycott Adidas, I took some time and did some research. With this research, I found that the image was in poor taste but no longer offended me as much as it had before. I still blame the heads of marketing. There needs to be a revaluation of every company's procedure and protocols as well as an in-depth look at the people that make up these marketing teams; maybe they're not trained correctly, maybe they’re not DIVERSE enough.

Putting this into perspective, if the Adidas could be considered a reach, then the situation with H&M has been blown out of proportion by entirely too many people.This world is opinionated and based on certain things that we learn as we take our journey through life. What offended me in the Adidas ad enraged others in the H&M ad. But what I can say is, if we stay in such a constant uproar our people will never win.

How long will it be until they pull people of color from marketing in totality due to the difficulty in casting without a social uproar? How long are we going to remain sensitive to human-made errors? Nobody is perfect. I’m not saying we should approve if KFC had a duo walk onto the screen shuckin’ and jivin’ about how much they love chicken – that would be the turning point to make black people vegetarian/vegan. But I think we can all admit that at times, we’re all being hypersensitive.