The ‘swagger’ of a nation: insider/outsider Canadian identity and the Toronto Raptors’ ‘We the North’ campaign

This paper analyzes the ‘We the North’ (2014) promotional campaign featuring the Toronto Raptors of the National Basketball Association league. We analyze the campaign’s primary advertisement, as well fans and journalists’ adoption of the term ‘We the North’, to examine how marketers’ predominant use of ‘Blackness’ constructs and commodifies the identity of the ‘outsider’ to audiences. The ad uses the urban streetscape to create a branded version of nationalism based on insider-outsider, outsider-insider narratives of belonging. Moreover, the appearance and deportment of Black bodies and Blackness are used to tell a particular story of ‘the north’. Members of the public incorporated these ideas into embodied, branded, and patriotic expressions of support for the Raptors. By centering the bodies of players and fans in our analysis, we demonstrate that ‘We the North’ nationalism risks obscuring the lived realities of anti-Black and anti-Indigenous racisms faced by many Canadians.