Is there a better inkblot test for America right now than reaction to Bad Bunny being the halftime act for Super Bowl LX?
Soon after his name was announced, social media exploded into meritocracy debates, as if the National Football League’s decisions are culturally motivated and not commercially. Taylor Swift is the most streamed artist in Spotify history. Bad Bunny is No. 2. For a domestic sports league trying to grow its popularity globally, the rationale seems clear.
And yet because he is a Puerto Rican who sings in Spanish, conservative talking heads must project outrage and offer listeners nonsensical objections.
“It’s so shameful they’ve decided to pick somebody who seems to hate America so much to represent them at the halftime show,” Corey Lewandowski, a longtime confidant of President Donald Trump who currently advises the Department of Homeland Security, told conservative podcast host Benny Johnson. “We should be trying to be inclusive, not exclusive.”
Suggesting Bad Bunny hates America is an interesting take, given Puerto Ricans have been U.S. citizens since 1917. The three-time Grammy winner also has four No. 1 albums on the very American Billboard pop charts and has already performed during halftime at the Super Bowl back in 2020 with Jennifer Lopez and Shakira. The FCC received more than 1,300 complaints about the show that year with the vast majority being from parents complaining about the stripper pole and twerking of the women, not Bad Bunny’s alleged hate of America.
It was clear they didn’t know much about the history of halftime acts, either.
In 2006, a Super Bowl held in the heart of Detroit — the birthplace of Motown — rolled out the Rolling Stones, who are from London. In 2010, a Super Bowl in Miami — home of salsa and Afro-Cuban jazz — gave us the Who … who are also from England. In 2002, months after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, U2 — a band from Dublin, Ireland — did the show. There is a decades-long precedent for non-Americans to headline the Super Bowl. Though, again, quick geography lesson: Puerto Rico is part of the United States and Puerto Ricans are U.S. citizens.
Detractors like Lewandowski and Johnson want to make English being Bad Bunny’s second language an indictment of his patriotism, as if growing up speaking English is a criterion for citizenship. It isn’t and never has been.
Instead of making people fear Spanish at the Super Bowl, maybe encourage them to spend this NFL season learning something beyond “gracias.” Because in this world, there are people who choose to speak in English and there are people who have no other choice. Only one of those scenarios feels like freedom to me.
That was the topic of discussion in the summer of 2008 after then-Sen. Barack Obama said this at a campaign stop in Georgia: “Understand this, instead of worrying about whether immigrants can learn English — they’ll learn English — you need to make sure your child can speak Spanish. You should be thinking about how can your child become bilingual.”
At the time, many conservatives — such as Tucker Carlson and Lou Dobbs — used those comments not as a prompt to debate the merits of Obama’s remarks about U.S. education but as a weapon to attack him. They accused him of being divisive — when years ago Nelson Mandela said when you talk to someone “in his own language, that goes to his heart.”
It’s not just a question of if our children should be bilingual; it’s also about being curious about the world we live in. This NFL season has already featured games in Ireland and Brazil. Mexico City is an annual event. The league is in it for the bag. And eventually there will be a team based overseas where Spanish is heard, visiting teams carry passports and Bad Bunny is no stranger.