The Super (Woke) Bowl

Super Bowl 57 seamlessly incorporated wokeness and it was...fine.

Super Bowl 57 might have gone down in the history books as one of the best on-field contests in NFL history, at least until a questionable referee call transformed the final minutes from bowel-clenching suspense into a mere wet fart of inevitability.

But what I will remember most about this year’s big game is how baldly and yet seamlessly the league incorporated nods to diversity and inclusion into the usual hours of ooh-rah trappings that accompanied the 11 minutes of actual gameplay.

It was the wokest Super Bowl yet. An all-female Navy pilot flyover followed a quasi-land acknowledgement (the actual acknowledgement was read before the game) which was preceded by a stirring rendition of the Black national anthem, “Lift Every Voice and Sing.”

The usual conservative media outlets reacted with entirely predictable outrage. Meanwhile, overly online progressives responded with glee at just how “wokity wokity woke” the proceedings had been. But I think the Super (Woke) Bowl demonstrates how conservative panic and progressive exultation are both exaggerations.

Cable conservatism and talk radio are practitioners of the dark art of transmuting fear into a fat bottom line. We’re mid-wave in the latest in a long series of conservative moral panics stoked by pundits hungry for attention and activists with an “anything goes” culture war-time mentality.

Conservatives have tried to turn a generally obscure academic theory called critical race theory into an existential threat at a school board meeting near you. And in a post-Obergefell landscape where overt expressions of homophobia are uncouth, hyping up the supposed threat of transgender predation—they’re in your bathrooms! schools! behind that bush over there!—has allowed backlash politics to proceed at a convenient remove.

The Super Bowl’s sheer mundanity ought to be an antidote to such silly (albeit damaging) culture war posturing. After all, this is the third year that the Black national anthem was sung at the Super Bowl, the third year that conservative pundits wrung their hands over it, and the third year that their dire predictions of national calamity came up empty. The Super Bowl started on time, the referees still sometimes made the game borderline unwatchable, and it was business as usual in America as we spent the next several days ranking the best advertisements and arguing about the (de)merits of the halftime performance. (It was low key genius.)

But while conservatives over-interpret the negative consequences of the Super Bowl’s “woke” displays, that doesn’t make it logical for progressives to over-interpret the positive effects. As I watched each display of racial inclusiveness, I couldn’t help thinking, “Is this really it?”

I have, in my closet, a red 49ers jersey with Colin Kaepernick’s name across the back. I am not a 49ers fan—keep pounding, Panthers!—but I have the utmost respect for a player who ultimately sacrificed his football career to highlight the problems of racial injustice in policing.

Putting “Lift Every Voice and Sing” before the Super Bowl was part of a package of surface level concessions offered by league officials in an attempt to assuage the anthem kneeling protest movement started by Kaepernick. As one critic of the decision put it:

We sing the Black national anthem at Black church events, HBCU graduations and events and when we are honoring Dr. Martin Luther King Day. It means something to us. Playing it at an NFL game would be a joke. If they want to fix something, hire 12 more Black head coaches and 30 other coaches and coordinators. Hire 10 Black general managers. That’s just a start.

Singing the Black national anthem before the Super Bowl is acoustic tokenism, the use of a facade of racial equality to avoid substantively grappling with the racial inequality that continues to afflict the operations of the National Football League.

Far more meaningful than any official display of racial inclusion was the fact that this was the first Super Bowl ever to feature two Black starting quarterbacks, who put in two of the best performances in championship history. (Fittingly, Kansas City Andy Reid was also on the sideline, albeit for the Philadelphia Eagles, for this throwback reminder of how far we’ve come in twenty years.)

Thus, far from being “wokity wokity woke,” the pre-game displays of diversity were created in a rearguard effort, a delaying tactic designed to prevent a full accounting for the league’s historic mistreatment of players and other personnel of color.

The same pattern of both conservative and progressive overreaction holds true with gender equality and indigenous representation. Having female pilots didn’t cause the planes to fall out of the sky or make America a laughing stock among our enemies; but cooing over Strong Female Pilots™—by design—did nothing to address systemic gender bias in military recruiting.

Inasmuch as there is a moral to this story—beyond the routine reminder that culture wars are all heat and little light—it’s that there is nothing that can’t be coopted by the NFL, which will rub off all the pointy, radical bits and incorporate it into a generic display of patriotic sentimentalism.