BTR News = The Sneaker Game: Black Dollars, White Profits

by Scotty Reid

The research company Statista reported recently that the 2020 revenue for the global athletic shoe market or sneaker market was valued at around 70 billion U.S. dollars annually, and it reports that the market is forecast to reach a value of 102 billion U.S. dollars in four years.

Sneakers as they’re popularly known in the United States became a fashion staple in the Black community around the late 1970s and 1980s owing to their growing popularity in part to the early interactions of hip-hop culture. Not only did break dancers, an athletic form of dancing that included elements of gymnastics, need comfortable shoes to perform but matching the shoes to an outfit, a fashion statement was just as important to the performers.

Then in the mid-80s came along one Michael Jeffrey Jordan, who had one of the best NBA careers of his era, and became arguably the first global influencer long before the age of social media. Nike’s media campaigns really leaned into a proud Black Identity without overtly showing their hand, by telling everyone to Just Be Like Mike, a Black man in a white-dominated society!

It helped that Jordan the man was not one to wade into the social-political sphere once quipping that “republicans buy shoes too” when asked to endorse the Black Democrat Harvey Gannt, the former mayor of Charlotte, North Carolina, who hope to defeat the lifelong white supremacist, Senator Jesse Helms. Another bonus for Nike was that Jordan the man would likely not be raising any issues with Nike’s labor practices let alone concern himself about where the Jordans sneakers were manufactured.

Nike’s iconic commercials, one starring, directed, and produced by famed Black film director Spike Lee at the peak of his popularity, somewhat of a Black cultural icon and a basketball fan in his own right, the media campaigns made Nike’s Jordans brand its signature shoe driving the majority of its sales and thus profits.

Sneakers are still a foundation of Black fashion t