When Black history becomes a marketing motif instead of shared authorship, something has already gone wrong.
A $210 sneaker inspired by the Lorraine Motel, the site of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, isn’t homage. It’s a branding decision made in a room where the wrong people had final say.
Nike’s LeBron “MLK” sneaker was meant to be a tribute. Instead, it exposed a truth we’ve known for decades: we are invited to buy the product, but rarely invited to shape the narrative.
The issue isn’t the colorway. Not the typography. Not even LeBron’s involvement.
The issue is who held veto power in the process, and who didn’t.
Dr. King’s legacy is not aesthetic. It is not a mood board or a seasonal product drop. His life’s work challenged economic exploitation and corporate power, demanding dignity for laborers. To reduce that legacy to a sneaker release, without deep community partnership, isn’t just tone-deaf. It’s a reminder that Black history is still treated as content, not context.
When criticism emerged, defenders said the shoe was meant to “honor” King. But honor without accountability is performance. If the goal was a genuine tribute, where were the Memphis community voices? The King family foundation? The Black cultural strategists are empowered to say, “This doesn’t land right.”?
Because somewhere in that process, someone surely did. They just weren’t sitting at the decision table.
This is bigger than Nike. It’s a recurring pattern across industries: Black culture fuels global profit engines while Black leadership is sidelined in the rooms where meaning is assigned. We see it in fashion campaigns that borrow our aesthetics without crediting our designers. In streaming platforms that profit from our stories while green-lighting projects without us in the producer chairs. In tech companies that target our communities with products we didn’t help build.
We are consumers, collaborators, endorsers, but too rarely co-authors.
And here’s the inconvenient truth: representation is not having a famous Black athlete attached to the product. Representation is having Black decision-makers with veto power before the product reaches the public. It’s the difference between consultation and control, between being in the room and having a vote.
The marketplace has taught corporations to value Black buying power. What they haven’t learned is to value Black creative authority and cultural expertise as essential, not optional, in the process.
This matters because the pattern doesn’t end with sneakers. It extends to how our history is taught, how our neighborhoods are developed, and how our stories are told. When we are locked out of decision-making, we get symbols without substance. Gestures without power. Products that claim to honor us while continuing to extract from us.
If brands want to honor our history, they must share its authorship. That means Black strategists at the concept stage. Black executives with green-light authority. Black community leaders should have meaningful input before the campaign launches, not damage control after the backlash hits.
Until then, these tributes will keep missing the mark, not because we’re “too sensitive,” but because we’re finally insisting on something long overdue: A seat at the table. Not just a place in the checkout line.
Ani Catherine is a guest writer for Evans Cutchmore, writing at the intersection of power, memory, and institutional authority. Her work exists where power is exposed rather than explained, resisting simplification, polite consensus, and inherited narratives left uninterrogated.
Her essays move through history, identity, grief, and structural control, examining what gets preserved, what gets erased, and who benefits from the distinction. This work is intentionally unfiltered. Some pieces unsettle. Others linger. All are written with the understanding that language is never neutral, memory is never accidental, and silence is often policy.
Read at your own risk. This is not a soft place to land.
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