A month ago Nike took Chris Rock’s advice and fled Martin Luther King Boulevard. People are looting the store with impunity–no need any longer to wait for rioting and a subsequent, temporary collapse of order. Since BLM’s triumphant summer of 2020 the ensuing raft of legislation against criminal prosecutions generally because they fall too hard on Blacks! and the reign of woke Multnomah County District Attorney MIke Schmidt have rendered rioting obsolete, from the looters’ point of view; order is low-key suspended, indefinitely.
Nike has temporarily closed a retail location in Portland, Oregon, with one of the richest histories in its store footprint because of ongoing theft.
“People were just going in there with bags already opened and picking up stuff and walking out the door past unarmed security,” Ron Herndon, a Portland civil rights and education activist, told Insider, about the closure of the Nike store on the city’s MLK Boulevard.
Herndon worked with Nike to open the store in 1984.
Well, at least they had the right footwear for running away. When you need to flee, choose Nike.
The “community store” was opened after a campaign led by the above mentioned Herndon to bring businesses into Black! neighborhoods. In 2004 the company celebrated 20 years of operation:
“Nike has been a key economic driver for this community, and they are to be congratulated not only for doing business here for the last 20 years, but for being one of the first area businesses to stand up and declare Northeast Portland as a viable community to do business in,” said Ron Herndon, who led the Black United Front in the 1980s and served as a catalyst for encouraging businesses, including the Nike Factory Store, to locate in the community. “Northeast Portland has seen incredible change in the last two decades that simply could not have happened at the speed it did if it were not for the significant commitments made by Nike and others in the business community–both in terms of achieving economic reward and providing community investment.”
When the Nike Portland Factory Store opened in 1984, it pledged to donate a portion of the store’s profits to community-based non-profit organizations…
Nike is still trying to get uniformed police as a condition of reopening the MLK store and for its downtown location near the still-fortified Apple store, where the aesthetic and banners no longer celebrate powerful and fleet athletes in motion, but Black! women and sexual ambiguity. No more stout or svelte mannequins; they’ve all put on weight, let themselves go, and that’s the point; now it’s rotund female figures in yoga poses.
Nike has donated massively to BLM and related causes, and here in Portland the disintegration of downtown is directly related to the BLM riots and subsequent legislation of 2020. But Nike’s money is nothing compared to the cultural effect it leverages with such as their Kaepernick ad campaign–a political campaign under the guise of private enterprise.
So if Nike, once a remarkable Northwest success story, is to die on this hill of shit they’ve created, let us call it the Curse of Colin.
untethered 