"I don’t know what my parents felt about either the Super Bowl’s or TPUSA’s halftime shows."”

NEDERLAND — Three things that my drug-addicted parents taught me: never trust the cops; the government hates poor people; and the Patriots always cheat. 

There was certainly much more that I had to “unlearn” from my mother and stepfather, but these three points have remained absolute. 

Football was religion in the house I grew up in. My mother is a New York Giants fan—it was pronounced so at her birth. My stepfather loves the Miami Dolphins. Why? I don’t know. I’m not entirely sure he’s ever been to Miami, but that orange and turquoise were forced upon our home decor from August to February. 

Flags, banners, blankets, hats, slippers, robes, DVDs, rule books, framed memorabilia—it was everywhere. On every wall. In every room. 

They would celebrate on their holy Sundays with ritualistic bong hits, screaming at the television, cheering their favorites and jeering their rivals. 

“Run, n***er, run,” they’d yell, if the player were a Black man. 

“Go, you dumb sp**,” if he were Latino. 

“Shut up, stupid b****,” they’d say to the female sidelines reporter, who they called the “Title IX hire,” as they just wanted to get back to the action on the field.

“What a p***y,” whenever someone got hurt. 

“F***ot,” they’d exclaim whenever a player they didn’t like was on screen.  

Throughout my teenage years and much of my twenties, I never thought that the parents I lived with were racist. What they preached appeared to be common sense; they were “equal opportunity haters,” and anything reprehensible they said would also apply to white people, they swore. 

“If you don’t want to be called a n***er, don’t act like one,” was one mantra. “If I do something trashy, I deserve to be called white trash.”  

Another reason I never thought I grew up in a racist household was because Black-centric movies and television shows were prevalent in our home. “In Living Color” was one of my mother’s favorite shows, and “New Jack City” one of her favorite movies. 

It was acceptable when Black people wanted to make us laugh, or play sports really well, or show us the gritty “reality” of the streets that we’d never witness for ourselves. But there weren’t many examples of Black excellence in the programming that we watched—despite civil rights advocacy being one of the ways my mother rebelled back in her youth, growing up in an all-white, suburban town.

Politically, my mother and stepfather were often all over the middle of the spectrum: mostly centrist and a bit to the left. I remember they loved Ross Perot for some reason. They were okay with Bill Clinton because they felt that their financial situation was better under his presidency.

They ate up the whole drama of the Monica Lewinsky affair like popcorn. They hated how Kenneth Starr was “going after” Clinton, yet they gave Lewinsky no quarter or sympathy. 

My mother thought George W. Bush was an idiot, and felt that 9/11 was an inside job under his watch, due to sweetheart deals gone sour between the Bush legacy and the Saudis. 

My stepfather was just jealous of Bush’s ranch and cowboy hats. 

I noticed then, as the Patriot Act and Homeland Security became dominant and enveloped the country’s issues with all immigration (not just the monitoring of Muslims), that the parents I lived with were always quiet regarding matters of immigration reform. 

I had been bitten by the political bug at that point, and was ready to rally against the prospect of a second term under such a “fascist regime,” but my parents were silent when Bush got reelected.  

Over time, they became more and more the prime candidates for MAGA, before MAGA was even a thing. The proto-MAGA. 

They claimed to hate government overreach, and were believers in a secret class war, a conspiracy cemented when the big banks got their bailouts. My mother appeared to support gay marriage and LGBTQIA+ rights, until hate speech and hate crimes became legislation, and then she turned completely 180 degrees. 

And immigration. Immigration was always their political sticking point—the trigger that would melt them down from reasonable to troglodyte. Whenever activated, as if struck by a taser, they would froth about “illegals” that were coming into our country in droves, stealing our hard-earned jobs, reaping our well-deserved benefits. 

The signs were always there, in the way they laughed at all the “idiots” clashing with the police in Los Angeles in 1992, or derided all the “dumbasses” marching in the streets in 2006. 

By the time Barack Obama was elected, my mother and stepfather weren’t doing well enough financially to even consider being Democrats anymore. Years of hard drug use and other reckless financial habits had them kicked out of our whitebread town’s only low-income housing, forcing them to move to a trailer home upstate. 

My mother collected disability and my stepfather was embroiled in a decades-long lawsuit for workman’s compensation. Neither of them worked, let alone had their jobs or their prospects stolen by immigrants. An immigrant didn’t squander their inheritances, or cause their cars or furniture to be repossessed. An immigrant didn’t steal their children’s scholarship money. 

But throughout my entire adolescence, immigrants and people of color were always blamed—for why we were poor, for why we were sick, for why we were hungry. And since they were to blame, how dare they be celebrated?

How dare Black people get a whole month honoring their history? How dare Puerto Ricans get a parade? How dare LGBTQIA+ people feel pride? 

The last time I spoke with my mother I was trying to explain how it felt to have one of my stepchildren tell me that they weren’t going to go to their town’s Pride parade out of fear of violence against them. I couldn’t finish my sentence because my mother scoffed as soon as the words “Pride parade” left my lips.

For this and many other reasons, I haven’t spoken with her in several months, but I’ve thought about her all throughout this football season, especially during the “controversy” surrounding this year’s Super Bowl halftime show. 

Every meltdown about Bad Bunny and Green Day that I read online brings me right back to the house I grew up in; to those tiny four walls covered in hideous regalia, full of smoke and the cacophony of ignorance mixed with narcissism. 

Green Day, who were famously opposed to George W. Bush’s administration—so much so that they released a concept rock opera about it, entitled American Idiot—called out ICE agents during their pre-Super Bowl performance, telling them to quit their “shitty jobs.”

But at the game itself, the “punk” band failed to call out President Donald J. Trump in verses which they had recently revamped to fit the current administration.  

Bad Bunny brought the richness of his culture to the field, as well as that of many others, as he shouted out Caribbean islands and Latin nations across Central, South, and North America. His infectious performance brought color and celebration, and a little bit of political expression, all to showcase to the nation that “Together we are America.” And that love is greater than hate.

By comparison, Kid Rock’s Turning Point USA performance was stark and monochromatic, as rock and country music artists Gabby Barrett, Lee Brice, and Brantley Gilbert sang on stage in intimate darkness, bathed in a sinister red light. The 30-minute performance ended with a tribute to Charlie Kirk, and with Kid Rock telling the crowd to “find Jesus.”

The TPUSA alternative halftime show was crafted for people just like my mother and stepfather: aggravated “hard-working” people who just want to watch some good ol’ fashioned American football, without all that politicking—i.e., easily triggered racists with chips on their shoulders, ripe to be manipulated by fascism.  

But the Super Bowl, just like the Olympics—once extensions of political theater used to maintain order and class hierarchies—have become showcases for the dissent of the masses, where athletes kneel rather than capitulate, audiences boo those who exhibit hatred and commit atrocities, and halftime shows highlight the multifaceted nature of a nation, not just homogeneity.

I don’t know what my parents felt about either the Super Bowl’s or TPUSA’s halftime shows. I don’t know if they hate-watched Bad Bunny’s statement of inclusivity, or if they went and found Jesus and together tapped their toes to Kid Rock singing about “all the crackheads, the critics, the cynics,“ and all his “heroes in the Methadone clinics.” 

I don’t know if they were forced to face the hate in their heart on their holy Sunday, when trying to crawl into the television, into their warm American safe-space.

If they were forced to be human, perhaps I would have heard from them by now—but their silence, and the silence of so many others, is the shrieking nails-on-the-chalkboard of complicity, that proves that it is too easy for some to just turn the channel to the Puppy Bowl.