Will Dr Dre’s halftime Super Bowl show move the NFL beyond its race crisis?
The league’s racial issues are arguably as bad as ever – for more on that, read my colleague Andrew Lawrence’s piece on the optics of this year’s halftime show.
This blog is firmly not about sports, but the Super Bowl half-time show, as the most watched concert of the year, is inextricable from the NFL’s abundant issues with race and gender and its tendency to favor performative gestures (hashtags for racial justice on the field) over substantive change (hiring any black coaches – there is only one, in a league of 32 teams). This year’s line-up features some of the biggest Black artists in the US – Dr Dre, Kendrick Lamar, Snoop Dogg and Mary J Blige.
The line-up is “too big to fail”, he writes, but “like the league’s efforts to address its race and gender problems, this too appears to be a no-win proposition”.