Sad-boy billionaire Mark Zuckerberg thinks he can find his “masculine energy” by sucking up to a 78-year-old autocrat slathered in orange. But for all the alleged “masculine energy” surrounding Trumpists, there has never been a bigger group of babies. This administration and its acolytes are part of what I call “the cult of the white whine.” Well, grab a goblet, because the white whine will be flowing this Sunday.

The Super Bowl, of course, is this weekend in New Orleans and will be the most watched event of the year. It is still one of the few shared experiences left in this divided country. The day, as programmed by the NFL, was set to celebrate New Orleans’s incredible history of Black music and culture. Yet, given the current climate of voluntary surrender to Donald Trump’s “anti-DEI” (anti-Black) obsession, it would not have surprised me if the NFL pulled the plug and just showed a hologram of Hank Williams Jr. on a loop. But when I contacted the NFL’s vice president of communications, Brian McCarthy, he not only affirmed that the show would go on but seemed downright excited. I’ve written about the NFL’s issues with institutionalized racism—in coaching, in management, in the treatment of Black players’ health—for years, but this time the league appears to be standing firm. NFL commissioner Roger Goodell even said at a press conference on Monday that the league would not be rolling back its efforts to promote diversity.

The people trying to silence Black voices and erase Black history won’t be happy about it. The white whine will pour before the game even starts when a New Orleans–born recording artist, the brilliant Ledesi, performs “Lift Every Voice and Sing.” With lyrics written by early civil rights activist and NAACP leader James Weldon Johnson, it is called both lovingly and derisively—depending upon who is doing the talking—the Black national anthem. That it is even performed at all is an outgrowth of the anti-racist struggles of NFL football players between 2016 and 2020—struggles that in 2017 provoked Trump in front of a packed audience in Huntsville, Alabama, (a vineyard of white whiners) to curse these almost exclusively Black players as “sons of bitches” and call for them to be fired. (Trump never played football but likes to whine that the game is no longer sufficiently violent for his tastes.) Whenever “Life Every Voice” is played, the very people scratching out Black history from our textbooks have raging tantrums, only proving its necessity. These are people who don’t want voices lifted; they want them silenced.

The rest of the day will be filled with musical legends of New Orleans like the legendary Trombone Shorty and Jon Batiste. New Orleans is the cradle of Black music—meaning all “American” music. In the eyes of the people in power, it must be DEI and anti-white prejudice that is keeping reality-show singer Carrie Underwood or the shower-allergic Kid Rock off the big stage.

And speaking of Black excellence, the game itself will pit two Black quarterbacks against each other—Patrick Mahomes vs. Jalen Hurts. A driving obsession of this baldly racist administration is that inferior Black candidates—who, according to their Health and Human Services nominee, RFK Jr., need fewer vaccinations thanks to their Blackness—are stealing jobs from the white man. Yet here are the quarterbacks—the field generals, the thinkers, the leaders. They are living rebukes to Vice President JD Vance’s belief system. If Vance were coaching the Chiefs, he’d bench Mahomes for Carson Wentz.

But that’s not all. The halftime act this year will be hip-hop’s supreme being, Kendrick Lamar. It was a shocker to many when Lamar was tapped for the coveted halftime spot. He had spent the year releasing raw battle rhymes aimed at Drake, one of history’s top-selling artists. Tracks such as “Not Like US” and “Meet the Grahams” eviscerated Drake and became massive global hits, winning a slew of Grammys this past Sunday. He can do a “pop-out” concert in Los Angeles drawing 16,000 people and have gang members tying their bandanas together and dancing as one on the stage.

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Lamar was the perfect choice. I just didn’t think the NFL, with its coterie of billionaire Trump supporters in the owners’ boxes, would sign off on it. Perhaps, in part, it was because Lamar performed a section of the Dr. Dre–produced Super Bowl halftime show in 2022 and was criticized by his own fans for performing the Black Lives Matter anthem “We Gon’ Be Alright” but leaving out lines that were critical of the police. Maybe they think Lamar will play ball: drawing in his massive audience while leaving out his politics. (He certainly did not dip into political waters at the Grammys.) But no one but Lamar, an improvisational genius, knows what he’ll say once he has the mic and the world is watching. Maybe he’ll say nothing, which would be fine. It’s a hell of a weight to ask him to carry: to be the voice of the unheard under the brightest possible lights. But when you think of the lyrics “They not like us” and Lamar’s penchant for the unexpected, it raises some hopes that he may point out that “they” (a Nazi-saluting oligarch and his minions) are not like us.

Lamar’s appearance is already causing a gush of white whine from a group of GOP New Orleans state legislators who issued a preemptive statement against what they fear will be a “lewd” and “offensive” halftime show. Toxic scoundrels such as this, who uncritically support a cabinet of alleged and adjudicated rapists yet lecture us about “lewd” behavior from a Black artist, are giving the game away. On Sunday, they’ll all be drunk on grievance, fragile as porcelain, choking on their tears—their “masculine energy” exposed as buzzwords for an agenda to oppress and remove those with whom they are scared to compete.

UPDATE: After the publication of this article, which gives the NFL credit for not prematurely surrendering to Donald Trump’s baldly racist agenda, news broke that for the first time in four Super Bowls, commissioner Roger Goodell will not have “End Racism” stenciled behind the end zone. Some are divining that the league made this decision because Trump will be in attendance. I reached back out to Brian McCarthy, the NFL’s vice president of communications, and he said, “This is a bullshit narrative. [Written the end zone] will be ‘Choose Love’. Teams have used on the field this year, ‘Vote,’ ‘End Racism,’ ‘Stop Hate,’ and ‘Choose Love.’ This is part of the NFL’s Inspire Change. We started the field stencils in 2020. For the championship games a couple weeks ago, the Chiefs had Choose Love and Eagles had End Racism. … ‘Choose Love’ is appropriate to use as our country has endured in recent weeks wildfires in southern California, the terrorist attack here in New Orleans, the plane and helicopter crash near our nation’s capital and the plane crash in Philadelphia.”