“Adidas said on Tuesday that it was cutting ties with Kanye West after he made a series of antisemitic remarks … Like many of Ye’s other fashion connections, Adidas seemed to be dragging its feet, perhaps hoping for a public apology that could turn things around.” – New York Times, 10/25/22
Hello, and happy Tuesday. Is that what day it is? We barely know because we’ve been on a ten-day-long media cleanse, which we highly recommend. What did we do? We hiked, we learned what pickleball was, and we listened to music—really listened, not just how you listen when you’re scrolling past a meme or attending a tolerance and sensitivity training session. We heard it. Wagner was our favorite.
Our media cleanse included all media: Twitter, email, newspapers, radio, television, and human dialogue. It was a breath of fresh air and allowed us to focus on what was really important to us: not distancing ourselves from antisemitic vitriol. And also pickleball.
So you can imagine our surprise when we returned to social media, email, consorting with Jews—all the dismal trivia of modern life—and learned that someone, who happens to be our partner in a €250 million line, said something that some people who don’t dislike Jews did not like. We saw how the after effects of that statement, and our silence in its wake, played out across the country in various alarming ways. We saw the multitude of calls, tweets, petitions, and pleas for us to do something, say something—honestly anything—and we could not agree more. That is why it sucks that we didn’t see all this until literally twenty minutes ago. At which point, we ordered a company-wide emergency meeting/welcome-back party to put our heads together and find a way to say that this is not good. Here’s what we came up with:
Our S.S. (Social Strategy) Officer sent this note out for immediate release, and here we are: no harm, no foul. Also, no Q4 bonuses, apparently. Unless we can make contact with a secret conglomerate of—never mind. It’s obviously been a busy morning for us, especially given the deliberate pace of our last ten days, but, like Leni Riefenstahl said, “I was never antisemitic. I did not join the party. So where then is my guilt?”
The last ten days—not including today, when we caught up on our partner’s words, our own silence, and the ramifications of both—have taught us a lot. Today’s corporate messaging world expects you to run like a German watch—that is, not quite as seamlessly as a Swiss watch but still adhering to generally accepted standards of time and pacing. Today, even shoe companies have to appease the insatiable demand for not endorsing violent rhetoric. And finally, nine days can feel like a very long time—or not long enough when you’re away from your email.
Anyway, we’re glad we could bring you up to speed on exactly what happened to make us patently ignore the antisemitic words and events of the last week and a half. It’s just such an unbelievable story—we wouldn’t believe it either.
Yours in shoes—not anti-Jews,
Adidas