From GQ.com…..
The evening of August 26th, in a Walt Disney World hotel ballroom inside the NBA Bubble, hundreds of players and coaches convened for a meeting in response to the police shooting of Jacob Blake, a 29-year-old Black man from Kenosha, Wisconsin.
Leading the group was the president of the NBA Players Association, then–Oklahoma City Thunder guard Chris Paul, one of the most vocal of a generation of players who had started to display messages of social justice on the backs of their jerseys. Paul, who in recent years has used his clothes and shoes to show support for HBCUs and the Black Lives Matter movement, had chosen a simple message for his jersey: “Equality.”
With his outfit during the meeting, he might have also been making a statement about race in another arena. An avid golfer, Paul wore three pieces by Eastside Golf, a Black-owned streetwear brand aimed at broadening the appeal of a game with a long history of racism and elitism. As he made his way around the Bubble in his gray Eastside sweatshirt, white tube socks, and blue limited edition Tournament hat, the brand gained traction on Instagram.
“The cameras are glued on him and he’s wearing our stuff,” says Earl Cooper, Eastside’s brand ambassador. “He’s representing so many of our values to the world at once: golf, streetwear, social justice, and who we are as African-American men. From a fashion perspective that exposure just launched us into a whole different stratosphere.”
