I’m rooting for the Black quarterback

I am not watching the Super Bowl.

I am absolutely paywalling this one, because if y’all are going to be loud and wrong in my comments, you can at least pay me for the privilege!

I do not care about football, like at all. Until last year I thought Travis Kelce was a quarterback, my reasoning being (1) he’s hot¹ and (2) I know who he is. So even if I watch this year’s half-time show, I will not be watching a moment of gameplay if I can help it. As I’m thinking about it, American sports are perilously boring. If you gave me a choice between watching football and watching baseball, I’d probably gnaw off my foot to get out of the situation.

Why yes, I DID watch Moonstruck recently. Much better than watching football!

But I know enough to know that the Philadelphia Eagles and the Kansas City Chiefs are facing off in the Super Bowl this Sunday. I know that their respective quarterbacks are Jalen Hurts and Patrick Mahomes. And I know that, this Sunday, I’m rooting for the Black quarterback.

This isn’t the first time Mahomes and Hurts have squared off—that was the Rihanna half-time show, two years ago—so it’s not the first Super Bowl with two Black quarterbacks.² But the political context is ever-so-slightly different here in 2025 than it was in 2023.

Like, I do find it interesting that Jay-Z and the NFL have done such a good job of targeting Black Xennials in our disposable income era³ with this string of halftime show headliners. Jay said in 2019 that “we have moved past kneeling,” and not only did he mean it, but the rest of us apparently did, too. Since then, we got The Weeknd, Snoop/Dre/Eminem/Mary J/Kendrick, Rihanna, Usher, and now Kendrick solo; and we’ve happily watched them all. The NFL removing the “end racism” stencil from the end zones in favour of even more anodyne phrases has sinister timing, given Trump’s re-segregationist push, but it’s also just validating how the NFL has always been moving.