New Nike Message Through Kaepernick? Just a Crazy Dream

Steve Marston
Sep 6, 2018 · 4 min read

Set to air tonight as the NFL kicks off its season, the apparel giant’s latest advertisement, starring the re-emergent Colin Kaepernick, is more “business as usual” than revolutionary.

On Monday afternoon, the world learned that Colin Kaepernick would be the face of Nike’s “Just Do It” 30th anniversary campaign. A single image posted to his Twitter feed features a close-up of Kaepernick’s face, eyes trained squarely on the viewer, overlaid with the message “Believe in something. Even if it means sacrificing everything.” Public response was massive. Supporters hailed the company’s deployment of a social justice activist, others destroyed shoes, and #Kaepitalism was coined as a largely derisive reference to the endorsement deal. In any case, Nike won their spot in the day’s headlines.

Yesterday brought the follow-up: an extended video advertisement, with a slightly shorter version to air during tonight’s NFL regular-season opener, titled “Dream Crazy.”

In the first half, a series of individuals are shown overcoming obstacles through sports. A boy without lower limbs wrestles and pins his opponent. In a sparse boxing gym, a woman wearing a Swooshed hijab throws jabs at the camera. Throughout, Kaepernick narrates in his California drawl, encouraging the viewer to “dream crazy” like these athletes. Nike’s leading figures eventually arrive onscreen, and we are encouraged to “be the fastest, ever” (like Kenyan runner Eliud Kipchoge), support “the greatest team in the history of the sport” (USA Women’s Soccer), and “if you’re a girl from Compton, don’t just become a tennis player — become the greatest athlete ever” (like Serena Williams). Kaepernick makes a couple brief appearances on camera, including at the very end to intone with a sly smile, “So don’t ask if your dreams are crazy. Ask if they’re crazy enough.”

While the Kaepernick announcement was widely believed to indicate Nike’s shift toward a social-justice orientation, this promotional video points to “business as usual.” It fact, it heavily echoes the company’s “Equality” advertisement, released during Black History Month immediately after Trump’s presidential inauguration, which similarly portrayed courts and fields as sites of equal opportunity. The sports world is saturated with the idea of meritocracy, that those who succeed have done so through their own exceptional quality and force of will. As such, social barriers are broken not through collective #resistance but individual willpower.

The erasure of social barriers might have been most clear at the midpoint of “Dream Crazy,” which featured Alphonso Davies, the teenage soccer sensation who made the Canadian national team after his family escaped war violence in Liberia. Over footage of Davies scoring a goal, Kaepernick declares, “If you’re born a refugee, don’t let it stop you from playing soccer — for the national team — at age 16.” Inspirational, for sure, but also implying that refugees would fare better if they just spent more time training on the pitch. This is the trap of the advertisement and its elision of what Kaepernick stands for: It implies that a starting NFL QB job or a sports victory could possibly be “everything.”

The academic buzzword for this is neoliberalism, where an emphasis on the individual as an economic actor takes precedence over the rights of a society. Neoliberalism plus meritocracy is the equation at the heart of this campaign — you within yourself hold the power to triumph over all boundaries, even white supremacy, anti-Muslim and immigrant sentiment, and physical disability. All it takes is a choice: to just do it. Nike and other apparel manufacturers have a vested interest in this perspective, especially when targeting a broader multicultural audience. You can, after all, purchase the Nike Pro Hijab through the company website.

Neoliberalism flies in the face of the root of Kaepernick’s campaign, which at this point has been twisted and confused so many times that it’s hard to blame even the narrator himself for missing the connection here. Kaepernick first took a knee to protest a legal and cultural system that led to the surveillance, over-criminalization, and murder of his black brothers and sisters, not because his individual potential was at risk. Only when he tried to address systems of oppression was he vilified — both by a myopic twisting of his message as “un-American” and by the concerted theft of his platform by the cabal of owners that runs the NFL. The thing that’s so attractive about Kaepernick’s positions is that they rest upon criticisms of structures and institutions (policing, major party politics, etc.). His newest statement implies that those barriers — which are centuries-thick — will disappear if you just punch hard enough.

Some Kaepernick supporters may be disappointed at his adoption of such rhetoric, but they should understand that activist athletes are human beings, complex and shifting. Muhammad Ali, now deified, once hawked Ford Motorcraft tune-up kits and D-Con Roach Traps. So it’s not simply that Kaepernick is cancelling out his activism through “selling out,” but rather adding another layer to his public identity. It just so happens that this layer might undo some of the socially oriented groundwork he’s been so carefully laying.

Steve Marston

Written by

Sports fan, academic, and sometimes both

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