Apparently, Even Selling Sneakers Is Racist Now

Converse dropped an ad earlier this month for its Chuck 70 X collection featuring K-pop girl group aespa’s Karina. She’s Korean. She’s beautiful. And she’s wearing Converse. That should have been the whole story. It wasn’t.

Within hours, the leftist mob online decided the Converse star projected onto her somehow resembled a Ku Klux Klan hood, while the pair of sneakers dangling from her hand evoked a lynching. As if a Korean woman and Converse’s marketing team wanted to revive memories of slavery from the Antebellum South. Is Woke 1 back? Are we back in 2017? I’m exhausted from the fake moral panics and race hoaxes.

Karina did nothing wrong with this Converse ad.

If you looked at this and saw a KKK ad, you’re psychotic and need to be checked into a mental asylum. pic.twitter.com/1moVP3flzI

— Kangmin Lee | 이강민 (@kangminlee) September 20, 2026

A lot of this meltdown isn’t really about KKK imagery in an ad. It’s about what Korean success does to people who are used to being the center of every culture war. When Korean stars, Korean soft power, and Korean brands keep winning worldwide, some people scramble for any excuse to tear that down because of their seething jealousy; hence the race hoaxes and the current online craze of insecure subversives trying to paint Korea as irredeemably “racist.”

Karina didn’t invent American history; Koreans weren’t a part of chattel slavery in America. They don’t owe anyone a ritual apology for the pop star standing in a Converse ad and holding up shoes.

Megastars such as Karina threaten a certain kind of narcissism — the kind that needs the world obsessing over one group and one narrative forever. Some ideologues grew so accustomed not only to America but to the world bending over backward at every accusation of racism that they’ve gotten addicted to it. Worldwide Korean recognition threatens that addiction, and manufacturing race hoaxes allows them to exercise power over others as they wait for brands and celebrities to fold. They view Koreans like me as “white-adjacent” for this very reason; they hate merit, excellence, and success because they have not attained it.

The irony of it all is that the chief marketing officer of Converse is Rodney Rambo. He’s black. Yes, he is the one they accuse of intentionally using KKK imagery in the company’s ad. And here’s the hypocrisy. While a cropped picture of a K-pop star holding shoes gets treated like a moral emergency for “anti-blackness,” actual black-on-Asian violence keeps stacking Korean bodies, and the same activist class looks away.

In Seattle, Cordell Goosby walked up to a car and allegedly murdered Eina Kwon, a pregnant Korean restaurant owner, along with her unborn daughter, Evelyn. In Los Angeles, 19-year-old Joonhee Han was beaten unprovoked by a black attacker on a scooter and later died of the head injury. In Dallas, Jeremy Smith opened fire in a Koreatown salon and shot three Korean women in a racially motivated attack.

These are but a few of thousands of instances of black people attacking Koreans. Where was the outrage? There are Korean families burying their dead while activists point their fingers at them, accusing Koreans of anti-black racism.

And the same race hustling industry that can turn a Converse spotlight into a lynching also keeps Americans hypnotized by a lynching archive from a century ago while ignoring that, in America today, more black Americans are murdered every few months nationwide than the Tuskegee Institute recorded lynched across nearly nine decades.

But they don’t care about any of these instances of death and tragedy because they can’t virtue signal and make money off of them. Accuse a K-pop star of racism over lighting angles, and the internet detonates. Name a destructive pattern of black predation against Asians and the intra-black body count that dwarfs the historical lynching tally, and you’re the villain for noticing.

That is not justice. That is a caste system of empathy: We Asians must continue to twist ourselves into a pretzel to prove we aren’t “anti-black,” while black aggression against Asians is ignored or forgotten. If your anti-racism only activates when it can tear down Koreans and goes quiet when Koreans are the victims, you were never fighting racism. You were protecting your own sense of racial hierarchy.

Wokeness isn’t only a Western pathology anymore. It is infecting the East. It’s not only Korean entertainment, brands, and corporations, but also Japanese ones. The pressure is always the same: Treat every American racial script as universal law, then punish anyone who won’t kneel. Koreans do not have to entertain that. We can say no.

Yet Converse apologized and pulled the ad. And that’s why the Left continues to gain ground in politics and culture. Leftists throw tantrums, and the most powerful political and cultural institutions bend the knee.

Koreans are not required to accept those tantrums. No one is. Reject the racial grievance script; do not give bad actors any leeway.

The way we win is not by appeasing and pandering to these insane radicals. The way through will be forged by those unafraid to be called mean names to fight for goodness, truth, and beauty and defeat chaos and disorder. As the late Charlie Kirk said, “I would rather battle the left with 300 courageous fighters than thousands of weak spineless ‘conservatives’ who run for the hills every single time the media calls them a mean name.”

The answer is just to say no. We’re not entertaining racial grievance nonsense or people acting like petulant, narcissistic children. We’re done. A Korean woman selling shoes is not a KKK lynching ad — no matter how badly the grifters want it to be.

***

Kangmin Lee is a Korean-American political and cultural commentator, speaker, and host of the Kangmin Lee Show. He speaks and writes on politics, culture, and the ideas shaping the modern world, focused on restoring faith, identity, and civilization.

This article is part of Upstream, The Daily Wire’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you.

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