As the saying goes, you never know about the accident you prevent; you only know about the accident that happens.
For a multimillion-dollar corporation, it means that, before an ad campaign hits a screen or a product lands in a catalogue, somebody with a different viewpoint — a senior executive, a junior copywriter, perhaps a mailroom clerk — looks at it with a critical eye. If that critic sees something objectionable or offensive, the ad campaign gets reworked or the product is pulled.
Then, nothing happens. No one is offended or outraged, no one blasts the company on TikTok, no one has to issue a damage-control apology.
Judging by what happened this week to Converse, the iconic sneaker brand owned by Nike, nobody critically reviewed the ad campaign for its collaboration with K-pop star Karina, which contains imagery that struck people as racially offensive. And if somebody did double-check the ad, odds are they weren’t Black.
Firestorm, Then Damage Control
Converse officials apologized after an advertisement featuring triggered an immediate backlash. In the photograph, Karina holds a pair of black Chuck 70 X sneakers while light creates a large, pointed white shape beside her.
A lot of Black folks, and a fair number of white people, looked at the photo and saw something else: a pointy Ku Klux Klan hood next to a pair of dangling feet, as if from a lynching.
After a social media firestorm, Converse eventually saw it, too — or at least understood why others did. The company removed the advertisement and issued a statement acknowledging that it had gotten it wrong.
But by then, the damage was done, consumers were outraged and Converse, a brand that dates back to 1908, had to ride out a tough news cycle that lasted several days.
Converse isn’t alone. Just weeks earlier, Target apologized for selling a children’s Halloween costume depicting a Black boy dressed as a clown. The child wore black gloves, a harlequin-patterned jumpsuit and a mask with an enormous grinning mouth, exaggerated lips, and big white teeth.
Again, people saw something the company apparently hadn’t anticipated: The grotesque caricature of Black people from blackface minstrel shows.
Another online firestorm, another round of damage control, another embarrassed company choking down nearly a week of bad press. Target pulled the image from its website and the costume from its stores, saying it was offensive and should never have seen the light of day.
The Converse and Target snafus raise an important question: Who was in the room when executives decided to go ahead with the ad or produce the costume?
Two enormous American corporations. Two things that, presumably, traveled through layers of designers, marketers, managers, and decision-makers. Two seemingly preventable racial controversies. Two apologies that didn’t have to happen.
Taken together, or as individual case studies, the Converse and Target snafus raise an important question, particularly as corporate America runs away from diversity, equity, and inclusion: Who was in the room when executives decided to go ahead with the ad or produce the costume?
Why Diversity Matters
To be clear, we don’t know who greenlit the Target costume or the Converse ad, and Black employees shouldn’t automatically be a company’s racism early-warning system. They should not be made responsible for scanning every new idea for racially offensive material.
Instead, it’s about why diversity matters. It’s about having people with different experiences at the table when important decisions are made, fresh perspectives that can see past blind spots and prevent bad decisions.
It’s a widely accepted principle in other areas.
Corporate legal departments exist, for example, because lawyers can identify risks that executives might miss. Companies hire cybersecurity experts to spot vulnerabilities that a web designer isn’t trained to see. Accountants are important because they see numbers differently than the sales team.
Yet when the expertise comes from lived experience — from being Black, Latino, Asian, gay, disabled, Muslim, poor, an immigrant, or simply from growing up in a world dramatically different from others around a boardroom table — suddenly, we’re told that diversity has trumped merit.
Sometimes lived experience is expertise. And sometimes its value is measured by what never happens. That’s what makes Target an especially interesting case.
In January 2025, not long after President Donald Trump took office and declared the end of “wokeness” and diversity, the retailer announced it would shut down several of its internal DEI initiatives, including its three-year racial-equity program and its supplier-diversity efforts. Dozens of corporations bowed to pressure and followed suit.
That, however, doesn’t prove eliminating those programs caused the Halloween debacle or the Klan-themed shoe ad. Correlation isn’t causation, and it would be irresponsible to pretend otherwise.
But the juxtaposition is hard to ignore.
Can’t Measure Prevention
Civil rights attorney Nekima Levy Armstrong, one of the organizers of a boycott of Target over its DEI retreat, put the problem succinctly. She told CNN the clown costume, which looked like it had come from an antebellum minstrel show, had passed through an entire corporate decision-making process, and “nobody stopped it.”
Angry Black consumers killed it from the outside, in the process making perhaps the most compelling arguments for corporate diversity. Not because every Black employee would have recognized the problem, but somebody might have.
That’s how prevention works — and why it’s extraordinarily difficult to measure.
Companies can calculate what diversity programs cost in salaries, recruiting budgets, consultants,, and employee resource groups. But there’s no spreadsheet column for Disasters We Avoided Because Somebody Saw Something No One Else Did.
It’s worth remembering as DEI itself remains the target of an aggressive political and corporate backlash. There is plenty of room to debate what DEI should look like, which programs work and which don’t.
But the Target and Converse debacles offer a useful reminder of something much simpler. Sometimes the value of having different people in the room isn’t what they create; it’s what they prevent.
