Hank Willis Thomas, The Cotton Bowl, 2011 © Hank Willis Thomas. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York. — Hank Willis Thomas, *The Cotton Bowl,* 2011 © Hank Willis Thomas. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.

As protests following the police killing of George Floyd rapidly spread throughout the country, brand managers across industries worked quickly to create sensitive and timely responses. Nike, a brand with a history of mixing advertising with social justice messaging, was one of the first sports apparel brands to speak out on social media. Their 60-second, black-and-white video renounced their infamous slogan as the somber sounds of piano music played in the background. “For once, don’t do it,” the video reads. “Don’t pretend there’s not a problem in America. Don’t turn your back on racism. Don’t accept innocent lives being taken from us. Don’t make any more excuses…”

As the channels for receiving marketing messages change, public expectation of brands and social responsibility has undoubtedly evolved. According to the HAAS School of Business at Berkeley, 9 out of 10 millennials would switch brands to one associated with a cause and are reportedly “prepared to make personal sacrifices to make an impact on issues they care about.” With the ubiquity of social media, where billions of users engage with news outlets, professional networks, social circles and brand messaging simultaneously, corporate brands and advertising have become more integrated into daily life. It’s no longer enough for a brand to be a trademark. It also has to be a friend, a conduit for information, and a social justice warrior. With marketing and advertising inextricably linked to other forms of media, brands and logos are becoming more loaded with meaning than ever before.

Hank Willis Thomas, Scarred Chest, 2003 © Hank Willis Thomas. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York. — Hank Willis Thomas, *Scarred Chest,* 2003 © Hank Willis Thomas. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.

Hank Willis Thomas has explored the language of branding and advertising in his photographs throughout much of his career. “I started thinking about logos as our generation’s hieroglyphs,” said Thomas in a 2015 interview with The Brooklyn Rail. “They can be embedded with so much meaning, and I really wanted to play off that.”

Using commercial campaign strategies, Thomas reveals how branding has shaped contemporary and historical Black identity in American culture, exposing the parallels between systems of possessing black bodies as commodities, and examining how companies elicit desire while maintaining culturally-embedded racism.

Hank Willis Thomas, Basketball and Chain, 2003 © Hank Willis Thomas. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York. — Hank Willis Thomas, *Basketball and Chain,* 2003 © Hank Willis Thomas. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.

“I was in graduate school, and I was reading a book called Michael Jordan and the New Global Capitalism (1999)” says Thomas. “It talked about how Nike went from being a $10 million company when he signed, to being a $10 billion company 20 years later… I was thinking about black bodies. Bodies like his would have been traded on a market at a different period in time. Now when these bodies are traded today, I was thinking about how much money is made from them. So we go from slaves being branded as a sign of ownership, to black bodies today being branded as a way to make money.”

In Thomas’s Branded Head (2003) and Scarred Chest (2003), he marks black bodies with a scar in the shape of the archetypal Nike swoosh, comparing the logos currently adorning black athletes to the branding of black bodies by slave owners. In Basketball and Chain (2003), a player leaps into the air in a moment of athletic determination, only to be weighed down by the shackle and chain of an NBA branded basketball. In Cotton Bowl (2011), a football player wearing Nike branded cleats assumes position at the line of scrimmage, coming face-to-face with a man picking cotton, crouched in an identical position. These provocative images challenge the use of branding and highlight the correlation between ownership of team members, brand endorsements, and the transatlantic slave trade.

The entire idea of “blackness,” according to Thomas, was created by a commercial industry and is therefore a branding strategy in and of itself. “The crazy thing about blackness,” says Thomas, “is that black people didn’t create it… Europeans with a commercial interest in dehumanizing us created black people.”

Hank Willis Thomas, Branded Head, 2003 © Hank Willis Thomas. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York. — Hank Willis Thomas, *Branded Head,* 2003 © Hank Willis Thomas. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.

Slavery as an industry was developed and maintained by stripping away the identity and individuality of black people to create a stereotype that would define them as commodities. What Thomas calls the “black identity” is a fabrication that has evolved throughout American history, leaving the black community to come to terms with their own individuality 400 years later, while continuing to face parallels of the systems that stripped them of their humanization centuries ago.

If branding had the power to create slavery and continues to shape the identity of African Americans in modern culture, today, with its powerful omnipresence in this time of heightened political and social awareness, branding certainly has the power to help Black Americans reconquer black identity for the future.

“Don’t sit back and be silent,” the 60-second Nike video implores in its last few lines. “Don’t think you can’t be part of the change. Let’s all be part of the change.”