Adidas' shoes targeted prison culture

When Nike began releasing its overpriced, slave-shop-constructed Air Jordan shoes in the ’hood specifically to attract inner-city tastemakers, where did you think the gym-shoe wars were headed?

When Reebok, in an effort to undo Air Jordan’s stranglehold on hip-hop sneakerheads, showered a multimillion-dollar contract on the Tupac Shakur of basketball, Allen Iverson, where did you think the gym-shoe wars were headed?

That’s right. Nike and Reebok placed the shackles on Adidas’ now-canceled line of gym shoes. Nike and Reebok laid the groundwork for Adidas to take the gym-shoe wars to their rightful home — inside America’s prisons.

The outraged, well-intentioned critics of Adidas’ initial decision to launch the “JS Roundhouse Mids” are upset about the wrong thing. They think the shackled shoes are connected to America’s despicable history of African-American slavery. They’re wrong. The shoes are an attempt to capitalize off America’s despicable drug war and subsequent mass incarceration of minority men of color.

Nothing could be more obvious.

Adidas wants to ride the wave of prison/hip-hop culture. The inner-city tastemakers who made Air Jordans a juggernaut brand in the 1980s and 1990s now mostly languish in prisons and graveyards. The key to controlling the gym-shoe market has always been controlling the inner city. Urban youth have been robbing and shooting each other over Air Jordans for nearly 30 years now. More than a decade after his retirement, the release of Michael Jordan’s latest shoe still sets off rioting and chaos among poor black youths.

It’s not by accident. Nike planted these seeds decades ago.

Adidas, showing its desperation and naivete, simply came up with an unsophisticated, straightforward, politically incorrect strategy to cut into Air Jordan’s dominance of the market.

It’s “nothing more than the designer Jeremy Scott’s outrageous and unique take on fashion and has nothing to do with slavery. . . . Any suggestion that this is linked to slavery is untruthful,” an Adidas spokesman said in a statement.

It’s true. It’s not about slavery.

It was about creating a shoe that would be appealing to men who have been touched by incarceration. They are the trendsetters as established by popular, commercial hip-hop culture. Their sagging pants, tatted arms, slang and acceptance of baby-mama and baby-daddy relationships drive youth culture.