Converse apologizes after woke crazies accuse new Chuck Taylor's ad campaign of KKK imagery

Converse advertisement featuring K-pop star Karina that was accused of being racist.

Converse quickly apologized over the weekend after the woke mob came for the iconic sneaker brand over a new ad campaign featuring a K-pop star, after some people posted a cropped image of the ad on social media an accused the brand of invoking KKK lynchings.

The ad was for Converse's new Chuck 70 X sneaker, which was created in a collaboration with a popular Korean pop singer Karina ​of the group Aespa. It showed Karina standing holding a black pair of the Chucks in her left hand, wearing a white skirt and a pair of the black sneakers. The singer is seen standing in silhouette of the Chuck Taylor's star logo that is cast by light from above with a black pair of the sneakers arranged on the floor around her at each point of the star. 

Agitators on social media cropped the image in a way that showed only half of the skirt, and the pair of shoes being held above the pair on Karina's feet. Then, they accused Converse of intentionally making the imagery look like a KKK hood and the shoes Karina was holding to appear to be the dangling feet of a black person who had been lynched. The uproar on social media was swift, with woke activists accusing the brand and Karina of promoting "white supremacy."

Social media users even went so far as to alter the image by drawing eye-holes to make the skirt look like a KKK hood and legs and socks over Karina's hand to make it appear as though the shoes she held in the image were being worn by someone who had been hanged. The outrage mounted on social media.

But it turns out that the marketing executive who oversaw the ad campaign is a black man, Rodney Rambo Converse's chief marketing officer for the last 13 years, according to his LinkedIn profile. Nevertheless, Converse quickly pulled the ad from all of its social media platforms and issued a groveling apology. 

“We’re sorry. We ‌understand ⁠why this image is deeply upsetting and recognize that we got this wrong,” Converse said in a statement. “We removed it from our channels and ​are working to ​remove it ⁠everywhere it appeared. This should not have happened and we will do better.”

Converse, which is owned by Nike, then drew of hail of criticism from many on social media who said the brand over-reacted by bowing to the woke mob and that the company should have instead defended the advertisement, which clearly wasn't meant to be racist or incendiary in any way, and only validated the bad-faith uproar by running for cover so quickly. 

"The ad was not a coded hanging. The panic was absurd and manufactured," Jennifer Sey, the founder and CEO of the apparel company XX-XY Athletics, said in a post on her blog. "The unnecessary response is what ended up making the whole thing real."

Watch the video below to see the ad and how users on social media manipulated it to push their agenda.