Spike Lee’s film Bamboozled (2000) chronicled a frustrated African American television writer (played by Damon Wayans) who created a satirical variety show about black actors in blackface that, to the writer’s consternation, became a huge hit before being taken over by white executives. The film speaks to the fact that African Americans at the turn of the 21st century were often portrayed similarly to how they were depicted at the turn of the 20th century.

In the context of Bamboozled, Jordan is antipodal to an African American in blackface. In Jordan’s rookie year with the Chicago Bulls (1984), prior to multimillion-dollar shoe and sports drink deals, Jordan’s agent at Pro-Serv, David Falk, said he wanted to “prove to Madison Avenue that African American athletes could be sold to the public.” Falk said that companies would literally say, “What are we going to do with the black basketball player in Marketing?” He knew his client had to be stripped of “black signifiers” to market him to the widest range of consumers possible – not merely viewers of Soul Train or readers of Jet Magazine.

Jordan’s phenotype could not be overlooked, but his imagined identity as stereotypically “black” could be distanced from the racial signifiers that dominated popular representations of other African American males during the 1980s.

As such, Jordan’s marketing starkly contrasted with his coeval and golf buddy, Charles Barkley, who was commodified as an unrepentant nonconformist. In an infamously popular Saturday Night Live skit, Barkley elbowed “Barney,” the annoyingly cute purple dinosaur, in the face. Barkley’s assertion that he was “not a role model” in the controversial black and white Nike ad served as a foil to Jordan’s commoditization as a wholesome family man – the perfect guy to share a Coke and smile with – whether in Chicago, Muskogee, or Moscow.

What went largely overlooked in the celebration of Barack Obama’s election as forty-fourth President of the U.S. was that his ascendance added new relevance to the Air Jordan phenomenon that spread across the globe in the last decade of the Twentieth Century. The archetypal similarities between Jordan and Obama were conspicuously pronounced in a myriad of ways: both were very successfully commodified as exceptionalist embodiments of the American Dream. The Obama campaign of the 2008 election cycle even had numerous photo-ops of Obama sinking baskets on hardwoods in “The Heartland” of America as a means of appealing to moderate voters. The candidate even correctly picked Jordan’s alma mater, the University of North Carolina Tar Heels, to win the 2009 National Collegiate Athletic Association national championship. But perhaps the most mystifying correlation between the Jordan and Obama’s commodification for consumption was the fluidity and transience of their racial identities.

In 1986, Jordan starred in a “Gentle Hair Treatment” commercial marketed to African American women watching Soul Train on Saturday afternoons. A decade later, Nike featured Jordan in an advertising campaign in which “His Airness” was portrayed as a Clark Kent-like corporate executive by day and superhero basketball star by night.

The latter ad campaign counterpointed criticism that Jordan and other black athletes gave kids impetus to dream of being entertainers, but not entrepreneurs, inventors, doctors, lawyers, or corporate executives – never mind presidents.

Likewise, Obama’s commoditization from an upstart congressman from the predominately black electorate on Chicago’s south side in which he had to accentuate his “blackness” and downplay his “whiteness” to win the trust of voters and various influential members of the community (such as Jeremiah Wright), compared to the presidential candidate’s commodified form, which had to conspicuously downplay race altogether.

Obama’s transformation, based on the context he was caught in, replicated Jordan’s own semiotic evolution from a distinctly black and largely regionalized cultural product in the mid-1980s to a universal and “racially transcendent” commodity by the end of the 20th century. The fluidity, transience, and paradoxical nature of Jordan’s commodified forms provide compelling credence to Mathew Frye Jacobson’s assessment that race is a social fabrication and byproduct of economic inclusion (for some) and exclusion (for many others).

Jordan’s incredibly paradoxical raceless racial identity ultimately served as an example that, as Jacques Derrida would have it, “racial discourse is never transcended, it is always already there.” Renowned Chicago Tribune columnist Michael Wilbon said, “If people don’t think race is a factor in everything, they need to wake up.” Jordan thus does not transcend the historical weight of race or others’ imposition of identity. “He,” as Michael Hoechsmann wrote in “Just Do It: What Michael Jordan Has to Teach Us,” an essay in Michael Jordan Inc. Corporate Sport, Media Culture, and Late Modern America, “transforms race for consumers, providing a desired alignment of a black personality who does not appear to pose a threat.”

Prior to Jordan, the National Basketball Association was considered a “black” sport and therefore largely irrelevant in mainstream American society. But Jordan’s talent, charisma, and commodification as a transnational and utopic fantasy of consumerism made the NBA a fetishized product on Wall Street, Main Street, the suburbs, the inner city, and finally the developing world.

Jordan’s carefully scripted televisual adventures on the corporate playground were, Susan Jeffords argues in Hard Bodies: Hollywood Masculinity in the Reagan Era, “destined to substantiate an All-American (traditionally white Anglo-Saxon) hard-bodied male identity, which would appeal to the racially sensitive sensibilities of the American mass market and counterpoint stereotypical depictions of other African Americans.”

Investors in Jordan’s commodified form tended, Walter LaFeber argued in Michael Jordan and the New Global Capitalism, to accentuate his status as a universally adored icon as “solid evidence that Jordan simply transcended race.”

Chicago Bulls owner Jerry Reinsdorf likewise said with no hint of irony, “Jordan has no color.” Jordan’s agent, Falk, explained, “Celebrities aren’t black. People don’t look at Michael as being black. They accept that he’s different because he’s a celebrity.”

Jordan’s “blackness” could indeed be muted by his strategic evacuation from politics and racial discourse, and by hyper-accentuating him as a wholesome family man and concerned citizen, thereby distancing his image from the racial “soft body” signifiers of violence, addiction, and unemployment that dominated popular representations of other African Americans such as the “welfare queens,” denigrated by President Ronald Reagan, drug addicts like Rodney King, hypersexual and pugnacious athletes such as Mike Tyson, any number of gangsta rappers of the era, and recidivist criminal Willie Horton, the image of which the George H. Bush’s Campaign so artfully used to fear monger votes in 1988.

Gatorade ads presented Jordan, urging viewers to “be like Mike,” a role model cast as the very icon of hard work, excellence, probity, and aspiration. Anti-drug ads produced by McDonalds and D.A.R.E. in league with the Reagan administration, produced during the height of the crack cocaine epidemic in urban America, portray a sensitive and concerned Air Jordan empathetically urging consumers to work hard, eat fast food, drink Coca-Cola, but most importantly, “just say no, avoid drugs, ‘do the right thing,’ and to be all you can be (like the army slogan).”

Though Jordan has largely receded from America’s twenty-first-century celebrity spectacle as a public figure, his economic and, therefore, cultural affluence remains immense. Products imbued with the Jumpman logo continue to be incredibly hot commodities among a myriad of demographics around the globe.

Jordan’s evacuation from race and politics as a means of accommodation was and remains incredibly political (rather than apolitical) because it was in strict accordance with neo-liberal-focused cultural politics.

Public figures that represent transnational corporations, such as Jordan, might try to move beyond politics and refuse to take positions on such thorny issues. But transnationals, the Air Jordan brand included, cannot in practice be neutral on such issues. They must take political positions, whether they care to or not, because political and economic benefits (or losses) are interrelated. Silence often speaks volumes, especially when considering that Air Jordans were made in sweatshops deep in the baking heart of the developing world as the world’s markets were increasingly globalized.