NFL SHOWCASING BLACK PANTHERS TRIBUTE PROVES THE LEAGUE STILL DOESN’T GET IT:
The NFL allowing a halftime tribute, no matter how oblique, to a group whose leaders brazenly raped women surely ranks at least on par to its mishandling of the Ray Rice domestic-violence assault in its offensiveness. No number of pink flags thrown by referees, or ads touting a “Vikings family” that morphed into an NFL family when one son moved to Cincinnati and had “Bengals babies” and another ate “Roethlis-burgers,” absolves this.
“Rape was an insurrectionary act,” Eldridge Cleaver wrote in Soul on Ice of transitioning from sexual assaults on black women to whites. “It delighted me that I was defying and trampling upon the white man’s law, upon his system of values, and that I was defiling his women—and this point, I believe, was the most satisfying to me because I was very resentful over the historical fact of how the white man has used the black woman.”
Whereas Black Panthers Supreme Servant Newton broke his pistol grips by beating four fractures into the skull of African American tailor Preston Callins in 1973 and killed black prostitute Kathleen Smith by shooting her in the face—both for the crime of calling Huey “baby”— in 1974, Black Panthers Minister of Information Cleaver allegedly murdered a fellow African American activist in exile in Algeria.
File the league-endorsed Super Bowl 50 halftime tribute to the Black Panthers away for some perspective this fall, when the pink shoes come out and the anti-domestic violence PSAs begin running once again during Sunday’s NFL games.
Oh, and to get a sense of how fundamentally the culture has been changed by a generation of the far left making, as Roger Kimball would say, the long march through its institutions, who were performers at Super Bowl I? “The halftime show featured trumpeter Al Hirt, the marching bands from the University of Arizona and Grambling State University, 300 pigeons, 10,000 balloons and a flying demonstration by the hydrogen-peroxide-propelled Bell Rocket Air Men.”
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