Kendrick Lamar performing the Super Bowl LIX Half Time Show (Screenshot).
BHM Our Voices: Perspectives on the Black Experience – Stories examining the issues, injustices, and events shaping Black lives today.
Three weeks into Donald Trump’s second term, it’s already the horror show we feared. And, like in classic horror films, the antagonist is coming for Black people first.
In short order, Trump has dismantled federal DEI initiatives, attacked civil rights, stacked his administration with white supremacists, and handed Elon Musk the keys to gut critical government agencies—services that support our most vulnerable, here and abroad. On top of that, ICE has been unleashed on sanctuary cities like ours, rounding up undocumented immigrants in raids that feel designed to instill fear, not enforce policy.
All of this is in lockstep with Trump’s “Make America Great Again” agenda—one that has always been hostile to the very idea of equality and justice, particularly for us.
Sociologist and writer Eve Ewing recently put words to what so many of us feel: Beyond the tangible damage, Trump’s presidency has put us “on our back foot, always and only reactive at best and immobilized at worst.”
You wonder what future awaits your kids after college. You think about what emergency steps you need to take now just to survive the next 1,440 days of this movie.
And you wonder if anyone else feels this level of dread.
That’s why Kendrick Lamar’s Super Bowl LIX halftime show hit differently.
I’m no cultural theorist, but I know what I saw: a jarring, symbolic, and unapologetically Black performance—the kind that keeps Trump’s DEI dismantlers up at night.
The headlines fixated on Lamar’s latest jab at Drake, his “A Minor” chant reverberating through Caesars Superdome, a final blow in a rap battle that was never really close. But there was more to the show than that.
Lamar wasn’t just sparring with a rapper. He was speaking to the state of America.
“The revolution’s about to be televised, you picked the right time but the wrong guy.”
“40 acres and a mule, this is bigger than the music.”
“They tried to rig the game, but you can’t fake influence.”
Was he talking about Drake? Or the President?
Either way, this was “DEI AF.” Black dancers draped in red, white, and blue. Samuel L. Jackson as a Black Uncle Sam, barking orders—a callback to Django Unchained—trying to lay out the rules of assimilation. But Lamar didn’t play along.
BE HUMBLE. @kendricklamar #AppleMusicHalftime pic.twitter.com/rjDLWMoT8w
— NFL (@NFL) February 10, 2025
In an era of Black erasure, it was something to see—our culture front and center on sports’ biggest stage, whether you loved the show or not.
For a moment, amid a stage designed like a game controller, a brother could breathe a little easier.
One more thing: Yes, our antagonists have a grip on the three branches of government. But they don’t own imagination. They don’t own creativity. They don’t own resistance.
Through music, art, poetry, and movement, we build. We connect. We fortify.
As Ewing wrote, “But many things remain firmly within our grasp, and our insurgent dreams are chief among them.”
Let’s hold on to that.
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