With the nation’s new administration coming into power, efforts by companies and organizations to unite people have quickly taken a back seat to appeasement, fear, hate and every “ism” you could imagine.
Many companies have quickly scrapped efforts aimed at uniting their workforce as anti-DEI executive orders and efforts have quickly taken hold.
Some have refused to budge, like JP Morgan Chase, Costco and Ben and Jerry’s, while others like Target have acquiesced, resulting in an eruption of emotions, criticisms, joy and protests.
The most recent party to succumb to this faux-outrage over diversity is the NFL, which announced on Monday that it was removing the “End Racism” messaging that adorned the end zones from this Sunday’s Super Bowl.
At the Super Bowl press conference on Monday, NFL commissioner Roger Goodell came out in support of the league’s diversity initiatives.
“We got into diversity efforts because we felt it was the right thing for the National Football League,” said Goodell. “And we’re going to continue those efforts, because we’ve not only convinced ourselves we’ve proven it to ourselves — it does make the NFL better.”
But then it was learned that the end zone messaging was being changed to “Choose Love” and “It Takes All Of Us” instead of “End Racism”.
Was it a random decision or did the message lose its power?
Was it because the current president announced that he would become the first sitting president to attend the Super Bowl, or was it because it’s being held in New Orleans in the MAGA-friendly and Jim Crow-welcoming state of Louisiana?
We’ll take the latter two for $2,000, Alex.
The decision marks the first time that “End Racism” won’t be seen in the Super Bowl since February 2021.
Backlash started to boil when the news of the change was learned, many being upset with the NFL for seeming to give in to the White House.
But NFL spokesman Brian McCarthy disagreed.
“We felt it was an appropriate statement for what the country has collectively endured, given recent tragedies, and can serve as an inspiration,” said McCarthy, referring to the terrorist attack in New Orleans in January, the wildfires that ravaged LA and the recent plane crashes in Washington DC and Philadelphia.
He also noted that the two end zone slogans appeared in the recent AFC Championship game in Kansas City and “End Racism” was included in the NFC Championship game in Philadelphia.
While support for diversity from the NFL’s leader is overt, the timing of the change in messaging can’t be viewed as a coincidence.
Not only has the former president returned and immediately rolled out his plan for retribution, directly attacking communities of color, but the Super Bowl is being played in a state that banned CRT (Critical Race Theory) from K-12 public school education (CRT is a graduate level course never taught in public schools), fought against the addition of a second Black-majority district, and that elected a governor who, as the state’s attorney general, supported laws that unfairly targeted Black people.
The NFL became involved with these types of messages two years after Colin Kaepernick first started kneeling in 2016 during the national anthem SOLELY in protest against police brutality and racial injustice.
The league launched the platform “Inspire Change” and a year later partnered with Jay Z and Roc Nation on the Super Bowl Halftime Show.
In 2020, after George Floyd was murdered, “End Racism”, “Stop Hate”, “Choose Love” and “It Takes All of Us” emerged. That same year, “Vote” was added, and that November, Joe Biden won the election.
Those occurrences coincide with the simmering of anger experienced, and eventually expressed, by conservatives and MAGA lovers, who spent the last four years plotting to overturn any progress that was made across the nation relating to civil and human rights.
That brings us back to this Sunday’s Super Bowl LIX, where you won’t see “End Racism” but you will see a sitting president whose beliefs and actions directly counteract that message.
So is it any coincidence that the message is out this year?
Yeah, I don’t think so either.
