The War is Not Over Yet

I found “Nike, Social Responsibility, and the Hidden Abode” to be very interesting, especially considering the statement “compare the $130 million dollars Nike spent on advertising during the sneaker wars with the corporation’s paltry donation of $100,000 to Chicago schools.” Though I understand that much has changed since the early 1990’s, but I also feel that it is fairly obvious that many of the problems presented in this article are still relevant today. In the 2003 movie Honey, there is a scene where Bow Wow as a young boy steals sneakers from a kid on a subway to try to belong to a group of gang-oriented kids. Seven years later, here in 2010, we see Nike’s ever popular t-shirt line (seen above) sporting lines like “Welcome Haters” and “Size Matters: My Check is Bigger than Yours.” So it seems as if the idea of “sneaker wars” that Stabile mentions in her article didn’t just disappear. This is a perfect example of what Bordieu was talking about when he said that “cultural capital leads to violence in the community. There should be no surprise that there is a social hierarchy created and challenged when there’s text saying so on the shirts of the “socially blessed.”