Bad Bunny

Yup, you're a racist!

This isn’t going to be a long post because this topic isn’t a complicated one.

Bad Bunny, an artist that most Anglo Americans have not heard of, headlined the Super Bowl halftime show. The show was very culturally Hispanic, from the language, to the costumes, to the sets. There is nothing wrong with Hispanic culture; it exists and thrives on its own. But the Super Bowl is not a Hispanic Heritage demo. It is the largest and most important American sporting event of the year, a national civic entertainment event with a broad, shared audience.

The entire performance from Bad Bunny was in Spanish, so basically, if you don’t speak Spanish or sign language, this was not the show for you. Press 1 for English. The point is not that Spanish shows are bad. The point is that they do not belong at an event where the vast majority of the viewership is not Spanish-speaking. The majority of the audience understanding what is happening is not supposed to be an afterthought.

When that baseline is abandoned, it is not because the organizers failed to cater to the audience. It is because they were not trying to cater at all. They were trying to program the audience. When you are not catering to an audience, but catering to an agenda, you are attempting to condition people to accept something they did not ask for.

Many Americans noticed this and had feelings about it. Most people are not particularly skilled at translating instinctive reactions into clean arguments, but that does not make those reactions invalid. The response to those feelings has been to malign those people as racist. Accusing people who struggle to articulate what they sense as racism is a bad faith move meant to deflect from the actual issue, which is the forced globalization of American culture.

This whole spectacle was not an accident. It was about artificially astroturfing global ideas and cultures onto a distinctly American cultural event. This was not organic representation responding to the audience of the Super Bowl. It was the imposition of a different cultural framework onto a shared national space.

There have been many Super Bowl halftime performers who incorporated elements of their native cultures into shows that still spoke to the country as a whole. That is how assimilation works. This show was not that. This was not inclusion. It was displacement. This is the explicit result of refusing to melt and insisting that the shared space bend instead.

And no, this is not about hatred, and it is not about race. It is about whether America is allowed to have a core culture at all. Whether a national event is still permitted to speak to the nation watching it, or whether every shared institution must be repurposed as a vehicle for globalized identity messaging.

It is shameful that this messaging is being rammed down our throats, and we should be embarrassed that this is where we are at. A national event that no longer speaks to its nation is not inclusive. Do not let yourself be intimidated into applauding it anyway, or silenced by being called sheep names like “racist” or whatever.