Super Bowl 57 is the darkest, wokeest Super Bowl ever. Sorry haters!
The darkest, wokeest Super Bowl ever – can’t believe I wrote this since it’s the Republican NFL, but here we are – started again with the anthem black national, “Lift Every Voice and Sing”, this time performed by Sheryl Lee Ralph.
“AMERICA ONLY HAS ONE NATIONAL ANTHEM,” Lauren Boebert tweeted, leaning heavily on her all-caps key. “Why is the NFL trying to divide us by playing together!? Play football, not revival.
Then Rihanna performed at halftime. Although she once said she wouldn’t play Super Bowl halftime because of how the NFL treated Colin Kaepernick and the protesting players, she was back, and make no mistake, Rihanna is one of the blackest and proudest performers of our time.
But wait, it gets darker.
Singer Babyface, a generational rhythm and blues singer, sang “America the Beautiful” before the game. He produced dozens of R&B hits and won 12 Grammy Awards.
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At this point, we had the black national anthem, Rihanna, and two black starting quarterbacks for the very first time. During Black History Month. It wasn’t the Super Bowl. It was Wakanda.
But wait, it wakes up.
The traditional pre-match flyover was conducted by an all-female pilot team, for the first time ever. Wokity wokity woke up.
There was also a moment when Lombardi Trophy holder Doug Williams was introduced to the crowd. He was the first black quarterback to start a Super Bowl.
One of the ads during the Super Bowl was for a Fox show about dating farmers called “Farmer Wants a Wife,” and one of the farmers is black. On a Fox show. You know, when we had black farmers on Fox, the revival went wild.
In the first half, after Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce scored, he broke out a very NSFW version of the “stanky leg” dance. I will also count this as part of the Black Super Bowl.
Yes, some of that is ironic, but a lot of it isn’t. The Super Bowl has become not only a game or a party, but also in some ways a mirror for all of us. It reflects what we like, what we believe in, what we hate, what we want, what we don’t want.
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For some, the NFL is trying too hard to please people of color and the woke crowd. (Does anyone have a woke mob base so I can visit?) But even if you know a little about the NFL, I mean a tiny bit, the league only partially does.
The NFL has some of the most conservative owners in all of sport. This is an ownership group that blackballed Kaepernick and did everything they could to stifle his protest movement until the horrific 2020 murder of George Floyd forced them to admit it. It was then that Commissioner Roger Goodell said on video: “Black Lives Matter”.
What the league has actually done is take incremental steps toward that spot, and even those steps aren’t actually huge. Singing the black national anthem is tiny progress.
In the end, even these small moves, made only in the past few years, are driving some people crazy. Think how long a version of professional football has been around, about a century or so, and those are the only real actions the league has taken on what looks like something close to being progressive. For much of the league’s existence, it fully embraced quarterback segregation and racism against black coaches.
That’s why these steps seem so transformative when they’re really quite basic.
What does it say? When you’re used to privilege, equality looks like oppression.
I look forward to the next Black Super Bowl… when Roger Goodell does the “stinky leg”.
In fact, it does not matter on this last point.
USA Today
