In “How Tiger Woods Lost His Stripes,” Henry Yu uses Nike’s popular ad campaign featuring multiethnic golf prodigy Tiger Woods as a lens through which to examine popular understandings of race/ethnicity in the United States in the context of global capitalism. The campaign illustrates that the mainstream conception of ‘race’ is highly problematic, and closely tied to white supremacist (pseudo)biological classifications. It also highlights the connection between racial representation and neoliberal capitalist strategies.

The ways in which Tiger’s race/ethnicity was taken up in popular media highlight how flawed ‘race’ is as a way of classifying people. When he became a professional golfer, the media reported racially loaded coverage of him, including bizarre calculations that broke down his race/ethnicity into fractions corresponding to the “purported biological ancestry of [his] parents and grandparents” (225). As Yu observes, these reports were disturbingly reminiscent of racist pseudoscientific discourses that were used to justify slavery and segregation. Although we know now that race is a socially constructed category, not a biological one, popular conceptions of race still harken back to the reductionist, white supremacist idea that “a single drop of black blood made a person colored, and no amount of white blood could overwhelm that single drop to make a person pure again” (225). Within this simplifying framework, Tiger’s individual identity and heritage are rendered irrelevant; he becomes classified as black. Indeed, the title “How Tiger Lost His Stripes” cleverly refers to “the process by which the complexities of human migration and intermingling … become understood in the simplifying classifications of race” (225).

In reducing the complexities of Tiger Woods’ mixed racial/ethnic identity/heritage to empty racial signifiers, Nike was able to profit from marketing (and associating with) him as a “black” sports star. Nike held up Tiger as an example of a black man who became successful in a sport dominated by wealthy, white men. In doing so, they conveniently put the onus of social change onto the individual through the myth of meritocracy. Moreover, the campaign obscures the systemic racial inequalities perpetuated and exacerbated by global capitalism generally, and by Nike specifically. Focusing on one prosperous, American person of colour detracts attention from the many people of colour Nike exploits behind the scenes in its factories in other countries.