In the long and unresolved American reckoning with racial terror, even commercial imagery carries the weight of history. Converse, a subsidiary of Nike, withdrew a shoe advertisement featuring K-pop artist Karina after critics — including a sitting U.S. congressman — argued that the composition of a white-clad figure holding dark objects aloft unmistakably evoked the iconography of the Ku Klux Klan and lynching. The company apologized and removed the image, but the deeper question being pressed is not whether the ad was offensive, but how it was ever approved — and what that approval reveals a