It was a team of Los Angeles legends. Dr. Dre rapped G-funk classics and played a mean piano. Snoop Dogg shuffled around the stage in royal blue and gold — though not before he was caught on camera smoking a joint. Mary J. Blige made the house come down with her emotionally-charged hip-hop soul standards. 50 Cent hung upside down for too long, prompting an explosion of memes. Kendrick Lamar, Dr. Dre’s protegé and heir to the Los Angeles hip-hop throne, fired bars with elastic energy. And Eminem capped the night of nostalgia with a rousing rendition of “Lose Yourself.” Oh, and there was also a football game.
On February 13, 2022, an average of 103.4 million viewers tuned into the extravagant spectacle within a spectacle known as the PepsiCo Super Bowl Halftime Show. The entire evening was a sort of homecoming: The 56th Super Bowl was hosted by L.A., the Los Angeles Rams were on the verge of taking home the trophy, and L.A.’s finest Black artists were on a stage that was Compton in miniature. It had been a long time coming for hip-hop. In the 55 years prior, the National Football League had denied hip-hop artists the spotlight. While Black rappers like Missy Elliot or Travis Scott would occasionally play supporting roles or make cameos, the headliner was almost always a pop act, and usually white. Not so, this time around. Except for Eminem, the roster of acts was all-Black, and aside from Blige, all rap. And the performance was top-notch.
And for many Black viewers, seeing so many Black stars tear it up on stage was something special. Dusty Gavin, who is a Black Ph.D. candidate at Yale in religious studies and African American studies, said that he felt the performance was great, and that “it was so nice for me to see Blackness put front and center.”
It felt good. But Gavin also acknowledged that he fought that feeling because he knew it was a “fantasy.” To Gavin, and to any viewer of Super Bowl LVI with passing knowledge about the NFL’s history of racism, the racial politics of the event were hard to ignore. The NFL’s ostracism of Colin Kaepernick has loomed large over the league since he took a knee during the National Anthem in 2016. More recently, the NFL was lambasted for an “anti-racist” campaign that was full of symbolism and short on practical changes. And on February 1, former Miami Dolphins head coach Brian Flores sued the league over racist hiring practices, a phenomenon many have tacitly acknowledged for years. Thus, while the centering of Black performers could seem like a positive step in isolation, it was actually a mere performance of racial equity from a capitalist organization eager to avoid further scandal.
In Gavin’s words, “change can’t be choreographed” by the NFL. The same goes for the performers. To believe that the artists were standing up to the NFL or representing progressive racial values is to forget that this was all planned and profitable. Anything the NFL and artists plan cannot by definition be resistance; the only possibility for legitimate protest is through breaking the script. The Super Bowl Halftime Show was simply a convenient distraction from its ongoing racist practices.
Last month, Brian Flores filed a class action lawsuit against the NFL, stating that Dolphins owner Stephen Ross had pressured Flores to “tank,” or purposefully lose games. Additionally, he alleged that the New York Giants, as well as several other teams, had interviewed him just to comply with the NFL’s Rooney Rule without any intention of considering him for the position. Flores is Black, and the Rooney Rule says that teams must interview at least one minoritized candidate for the head coach position. If the allegations are true, the Giants would have been caught trying to skirt around the policy, which is an attempt to limit racist hiring practices. That Flores had led the Dolphins to a 19-14 record over the past two seasons — their best two-year mark since 2002-3 — before being fired, adds fuel to the ongoing scandal. And, unsurprisingly, this is not the first time the league has drawn criticism for discriminating against a superlative Black coach.
The lawsuit has drawn attention to the racial hierarchy of the NFL. While 70% of NFL players are Black, only two of the 110 owners in the league’s hundred-year history have been people of color. Currently, only two of 32 head coaches are Black. Steve Marston, who is a white instructor at Yale teaching Sports, Capitalism, and Identity, describes this structure as composed of white men as the powerful owners, white men as middle management, and mostly Black men as the labor force. According to Marston, the NFL does not usually perpetuate racism through overt hatred but “patterns by which power and status are maintained predominantly in the hands of white men… and it’s a network, not just individuals.” White billionaire owners employ the commissioner, relocate teams, control marketing, make hiring decisions, and generate tens, if not hundreds, of millions in revenue. The owner class refuses to allow people of color into positions of power, and the NFLPA — the NFL’s weak player’s union — can do very little to change that on its own.
Therefore, the NFL’s decision to finally allow hip-hop on the field is not primarily motivated by a desire to increase equity and racial justice. At best, the NFL was acknowledging and ending its exclusion of Black hip-hop artists from its main stage. It is far more likely, however, that the NFL was trying to cover up its ongoing structural racism with an enjoyable and politically convenient concert.
But the NFL is not alone in shaping the narratives of the halftime show; the artists also play a large — and often complementary — role in crafting the politics of the performance. As the CEO of Aftermath Entertainment and Beats Electronics, as well as the founder of the legendary Death Row Records, Dr. Dre is an incredibly successful businessman. Ditto for Snoop Dogg. They, along with Jay-Z, belong to an exclusive group of multi-hyphenate Black capitalists. They celebrate Black wealth accumulation as a way to claim power in white-dominated spheres and provide for their families. Jay-Z, who is a self-described Black capitalist, caused controversy in 2019 by partnering his Roc Nation company with the NFL — a move taken by many to be a betrayal of his earlier statements supporting Colin Kaepernick. While we shouldn’t scrutinize Black capitalists any more than their white counterparts, the appearance of Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg do not signify resistance or transformative racial politics. Dre, Snoop, and Jay-Z are all primarily interested in accumulated capital, thus aligning themselves with the NFL and not with the Black working class. Blige is similar, in that she jumped at the chance to perform — unpaid — because of the potential for future earnings. She also dropped her new album just days before the show.
Eminem and Kendrick Lamar complicate this narrative because they projected a certain progressive politics during the Halftime Show. Eminem made headlines when he kneeled onstage before rapping his hit, “Lose Yourself.” Immediately following the kneel, theories arose over whether or not the NFL had allowed Eminem to kneel. If the NFL permitted the kneel, the gesture would be rendered ineffective: Choreographed acts lose much of their resistive potential. And even if the Detroit rapper had opposed the league, the individual action was such a minor event in the spectacle that it shocked very few people (Rudy Guliani aside). Kendrick Lamar’s performance was more troubling. The Compton rapper has been a leading artistic voice of Black American resistance, and the song he chose to rap, “Alright,” the unofficial anthem of the Black Lives Matter movement. Yet his lyric about hating the police was conspicuously absent. All artists engage in what Marston calls “hegemonic negotiation” when dealing with the NFL, trading purity of message for wider exposure. Perhaps Lamar had to agree to censor this lyric if he was to perform. Yet Lamar is already so prominent in American pop culture that this cameo did little to amplify his profile. And by associating with the NFL, Lamar further puts his reputation for Black radicalism into disrepute. Other prominent Black artists, such as Rihanna, have turned down Super Bowl performance opportunities because of its treatment of Black players. If Lamar truly practiced what he raps, he would have publicly refused the invitation.
Alternatively, Lamar, along with the other performers, could have called an audible. He could have called the NFL out for censoring his lyrics and drawn attention to Flores’ lawsuit. Eminem’s solo kneel could have instead been a stage-wide kneel that lasted for minutes. The performers could have pulled out of the event at the last minute. Or they could have gone off-script and educated 100 million viewers about police brutality or the NFL’s ongoing role in upholding structural racism. Many of these actions would have come at a great financial, and potentially reputational, cost for these artists. And because they had no obligation to do so, I am not faulting their lack of resistance. But we cannot forget that the Super Bowl Halftime Show has been a significant arena for effecting change. And with the right blend of politics and disruptive performance, it still can be.
Therefore, we shouldn’t just relish this Halftime Show as an entertaining concert and ignore its troubling politics, because that’s what the NFL wants. The confused politics fade into the background, and viewers are left with fond memories of a celebratory performance of hip-hop. And the racist structures that have guided the league since its founding remain untouched.