Woke Is Still Institutionalized

Bad Bunny at the Super Bowl and Ta-Nehisi Coates’s prophet status prove it

Woke has undoubtedly retreated from its peak in the early 2020s. Some even assert that woke is now dead. But this phenomenon is far from buried. This week brought two prominent examples of how woke remains institutionalized and powerful forces still bend to it.

One is the NFL’s decision to pick reggaeton “artist” Bad Bunny as the Super Bowl halftime performer. The other event is prominent black writers forcing mainstream liberals to grovel for the sin of sympathizing with Charlie Kirk. The public may have had enough with political correctness, but many institutions are still beset with this plague.

Bad Bunny is a very popular artist–among Hispanics. It’s rare to meet a non-Hispanic who listens to the singer’s music. It’s entirely in Spanish and real Americans find the reggaeton beat obnoxious. But it is liked by a lot of people, albeit a very specific group of people. In the past, halftime performers were musicians with broad mainstream appeal. Their music would be well-known to nearly every demographic and wouldn’t turn off people.

Thanks to Jay-Z, this standard has been cast aside. The rap mogul now controls the Super Bowl halftime show after shaking down the league in 2019. At the time, the NFL was skewered for how it allegedly mistreated activist quarterback Colin Kaepernick. To dispel accusations that the NFL was racist (always a curious notion for a majority-black league), Roger Goodell partnered with Jay-Z’s Roc Nation to produce the halftime show. The rapper has been in charge ever since Super Bowl LIV–and white artists have virtually disappeared from the stage. Jay-Z has primarily chosen black artists with widespread appeal, such as Usher and Rihanna. But last year he chose rapper Kendrick Lamar, who gave a very BLM-esque performance that bombed with most Americans.

It would make sense for the Super Bowl to learn from that experience and offer a performer more appealing to Middle America, such as a country or classic rock act. Instead, he doubled down on insulting Middle American taste by picking a Puerto Rican rapper who only performs in Spanish. It’s an intentionally political act. Bad Bunny is currently boycotting the continental U.S. as a protest against ICE. He fears his concertgoers would face deportations at his live shows, so he will only perform in Puerto Rico and internationally. He’s vocally anti-Trump and has a new track out condemning the president. His selection stands as a middle finger to Trump supporters.

The Super Bowl isn’t likely to change course for the rest of the decade. The NFL extended its partnership with Roc Nation to 2029 last year. We’re going to continue to see no whites on stage and more insults to traditional American culture.

The partnership encapsulates how woke remain embedded in these institutions. These institutions don’t want to upset black people, so they carry on with the woke additions. The NFL still sings the black national anthem before marquee games and still stencils “End Racism” into endzones. They’re awkward remnants of the George Floyd Revolution, but they’re kept to avoid backlash from blacks within the league and pressure groups outside it. It’s why Jay-Z remains in control of the halftime show. Ending the partnership, just like wiping away the “End Racism” markings, would open the league up to racism accusations. There’s still tremendous deference to blackness in American society, even if we’ve reduced the level of Afro-latry.

There is some progress. Jay-Z’s shakedown attempts aren’t as successful as they once were. He tried to pressure New York City officials into allowing Roc Nation to buy the Times Square casino. The rap mogul enlisted Al Sharpton and other prominent race hustlers to strengthen his negotiating power. It didn’t pan out. However, he can reassure himself that his claws are dug deep into America’s favorite pro sport.

There’s arguably no American institution more deferential to black complaints than the Left. While establishment liberals such as Ezra Klein want Democrats to put the woke away (to an extent) and appear more moderate, they face a backlash from their peers for daring to suggest that. They can ignore their white critics, but they can’t pull the same tactic with black detractors. This is playing out in the controversy over Klein praising Charlie Kirk for the way he practiced politics.

The New York Times columnist likely meant it as a nice thing to say about someone who was murdered. The public was horrified by the assassination and considered it bad form to attack the dead. Klein, wanting to appear moderate, followed public sentiment and expressed sympathy for Kirk.

That was a grave sin in the eyes of Ta-Nehisi Coates, one of the intellectual pillars of peak woke. The black writer lambasted Klein for daring to say something nice about an “unreconstructed white supremacist.” Coates joined Klein’s podcast last weekend and forced the Jewish columnist to grovel for eulogizing Kirk’s way of politics.

Coates wasn’t alone in condemning Kirk and demanding the rest of the Left follow suit following his death. Fellow woke luminary Nikole Hannah-Jones, the infamous curator of the 1619 Project, wrote an essay arguing that blacks and other minorities were justified in opposing public memorialization of the slain conservative leader. She claimed Kirk was a hateful racist who “dehumanized” many protected classes with his rhetoric.

Several black pastors and lawmakers felt the same way, proudly insisting they will not fondly remember the assassinated conservative. Texas Rep. Jasmine Crockett even tried to shame white Democrats for voting for a resolution honoring Kirk.

This rhetoric comes off as selfish and narrow-minded in the wake of such a tragedy. It’s terrible politics for prominent figures to denigrate a much-loved dead man. If these were prominent conservatives and Republicans excoriating a slain liberal leader, you’d see several right-wing leaders take them to task. But no one on the Left dares confront Ta-Nehisi Coates and Nikole Hannah-Jones on such matters. They’re black, and that gives them higher status in the Left’s moral hierarchy. These writers may be losing their influence with the general public, but they can still determine liberal discourse.

This could offer a preview for the Democratic primary in 2028. There will be several candidates trying to pivot to the center. But if South Carolina is the first primary, many of these candidates will have to revert to endorsing reparations, pushing for unpopular criminal justice reforms, and stressing America as a white supremacist country. These positions will sink them with the public, but they may be necessary to win over black voters. Liberals simply can’t tell that demographic “no.”

We’re not yet in a post-woke age. The social virus is still present within our nation. It still determines the decisions of some of our most important institutions. And it’s still a force to reckon with. This will be abundantly clear when Bad Bunny performs entirely in Spanish at the Super Bowl.