The Patriot Post® · Personal Foul: Injecting Racism Into the Super Bowl

The Super Bowl is supposed to be a thrilling contest between the two best NFL teams squaring off for football’s ultimate prize — the Lombardy Trophy. For millions of Americans, it’s also about the creative and hilarious commercials. Last night’s game was a tightly contested, back-and-forth affair won by the LA Rams over the Cincinnati Bengals with less than two minutes remaining. The ads, however, were lackluster, and President Unity showed up for interview excerpts during halftime that did anything but unify.

Perhaps the degradation of all the trappings of the Super Bowl is to be expected. All the cultural institutions in America are, after all, controlled by leftists, and they’re not going to let all those eyeballs go without being subject to “progressive” propaganda.

That means the leftist cultural issues du jour are going to be forced on us all. Last night, that was primarily the issue of race. Joe Biden’s interview with NBC’s Lester Holt showed just how important this issue is to the president and to the NFL.

The league, says Biden, hasn’t “lived up” to its commitment of hiring more minority head coaches. “The whole idea that a league that is made up of so many athletes of color, as well as so diverse, that there’s not enough African American coaches to quote, ‘to manage,’ these NFL teams, it just seems to me that it’s a standard that they’d want to live up to,” he said. “It’s not a requirement of law, but it’s a requirement, I think, of just some generic decency.”

Biden doesn’t seem to have a decent bone in his body. Elected because he doesn’t “mean tweet” like his predecessor, Biden has a long career illustrating his mean-spirited attacks on people. We won’t rehash all that here, but he can spare us the lectures on “generic decency.”

Racism is at the heart of things going on in both the NFL and Biden’s administration. We’ll start with the NFL. As our Thomas Gallatin wrote 10 days ago:

The recently fired head coach of the NFL’s Miami Dolphins, Brian Flores, who is black, launched a class-action lawsuit this week against his former team, two other teams, and the NFL alleging racial discrimination. The announcement of the lawsuit appeared intentionally timed for the first day of February — “Black History Month.”

Flores and his suit have continued to garner headlines, which is awfully inconvenient for the NFL. The last several seasons featured players and others kneeling for the national anthem ostensibly to protest racism. The league responded by having nice virtue-signal slogans painted in end zones and stickers put on players’ helmets, among other things, to root out the ostensible racism that plagues sports and the country. Where does all that stand?

“Last year,” reports NBC, “about 71 percent of NFL players were people of color and only a quarter were white.” Evidently, researchers were unable to ascertain the melanin score of the other 4%. Yet “only three people of color have head coaching jobs in the league, in which white men hold the majority of the roles.”

If we’re to assume that talent and skill determine the 71% of minority players, why is that not true of coaches? Moreover, the irony is that Flores’s suit means teams will be less likely to hire minority coaches, lest that coach fail to win and the team be unable to fire him for fear of a “discrimination” lawsuit.

Speaking of the law, that brings us back to Biden, who pledged to consider only black females for the forthcoming Supreme Court vacancy. There’s a word for that: racism.

So, again, spare us the lectures on “generic decency.”

As for NBC, well … oops. Before the game, Jhené Aiko sang “America the Beautiful” followed by Mickey Guyton singing “The Star-Spangled Banner.” For several seconds of Guyton’s performance, however, the network had her name posted on screen as “Jhene Aiko.” Would that error have happened to two white singers? Inquiring minds want to know.