NFL, We Don’t Believe You, You Need More People
The NFL is really trying hard to clean up their image, apparently, they aren’t trying hard enough.
When I first heard that the NFL was going to have National Youth Poet Laureate Amanda Gorman perform at the Super Bowl, something felt off to me. It felt off in the same way that it felt when I first heard that they put the phrase “End Racism” in the end zones of various NFL stadiums.
To me, it felt like the NFL just had to find a convenient way of saying, “Ah yes. I, too, love the Blacks”.
Similar to the Presidential inauguration, I found that American unity was a constant theme in not only the Super Bowl broadcast itself, but also in the ads.
One Jeep ad, featuring Bruce Springsteen, spoke about the importance of meeting in “the middle” and how we should remember that “the very soil we stand on is common ground”.
Another commercial by NFL, spoke to the diversity of football fans, stating that “football is a microcosm of America” and even claimed that the NFL was committing $250 million in order to “help end systemic racism”.
Help end systemic racism.
That’s a bold task for a sports league with approximately 70% Black players and not even 5 Black head coaches… and let’s not even talk about Black team owners.
