February 13, 2026

The Super Bowl halftime show started as a simple intermission, complete with marching bands and civic pageantry, growing into the world’s most-watched live musical event. These days, it often draws more eyes than the game itself, a global spectacle that quietly tells us who America says counts and who it would rather keep on the margins. But that’s only part of the story. 

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For some, the Super Bowl serves as a national ritual, asking (white) Americans to see themselves as part of a unified—but deeply exclusionary—whole. Don’t get it twisted: this event has never just been about football. It’s about whiteness, superiority, and economic dominance, upheld by a singular language, a singular culture, and a singular story of belonging. The halftime show has historically reinforced this mythology of ‘Americanness’—whiteness wrapped in military might, flyovers, flags, and later, the razzle-dazzle of Black performers like Kendrick Lamar (2025), Michael Jackson (1993), Usher (2024), and Rihanna (2023). These performances were framed as progress, meant to signal that America was becoming more accepting of diversity—even as whiteness remains rooted in the ideas that stolen land and stolen labor from Black people and other people of color is not only permissible but a sign of strength.

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On the night of Sunday, February 8, 2026, Super Bowl LX lit the embers of a culture war already burning across the country. The NFL put Bad Bunny—a groundbreaking singer, rapper, and songwriter from Puerto Rico who revolutionized Latin trap and reggaeton—center stage, and the reaction was immediate and sharply divided. Honestly, it wasn’t surprising to me, or to anyone paying attention: some saw a moment of joy and inclusion, while others saw an attack on what they imagined America to be.

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Highly anticipated, his halftime show broke records as the most watched ever, clocking in more than 135 million viewers, including president Trump, who was reported to have unkind words to say about the production. For him and others, Bad Bunny’s performance served as irrefutable evidence that the country is losing its way. Summarily dismissed as “un-American,” Bad Bunny’s halftime show was seen as an attack on “American values,” whatever that means. I peeped the subtext, that perhaps there is an unspoken fear that the house of cards on which American identity has been built is fragile enough to be undone by language, rhythm, or cultural specificity that dares to color outside the lines of whiteness.

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For many, Bad Bunny’s performance was a long-overdue, joyfully expansive moment that transcended borders, language, and history. As one Redditor put it, ‘Vibes are a universal language.’ True dat. Moreover, it pushed the boundaries of what constituted halftime show entertainment, making a bold and unapologetic statement about his Puerto Rican heritage, without translating, without centering whiteness and without flattening cultural specificity into “diversity.”

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Bad Bunny’s performance does more than light up a stage—it shines a spotlight on the myth of Manifest Destiny, that enduring idea that the United States can expand, absorb difference, and somehow remain unchanged.  Long before Bad Bunny took the stage, Puerto Rico was caught in the reach of Manifest Destiny—ceded, controlled, and treated as territory for expansion, profit, and strategic dominance, all while its people’s culture and sovereignty were constantly under threat. Bad Bunny’s performance reminds us that these histories of erasure and resistance are alive, audible, and impossible to ignore.

This connection didn’t occur to me in isolation; it emerged while I was immersed in genealogical research for another project, tracing the violence that made land profitable and the systems built to protect it, all while remembering, as a descendant of enslaved Africans, that Brown people have been—and continue to be—erased in the push-pull between whiteness and Blackness.

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Was the NFL’s decision to platform Bad Bunny lead to a collective moment of healing, or did it expose the lingering anger of those invested in whiteness, those who haven’t finished erasing the cultures and people who exist outside its narrow boundaries?  

And what’s next? Will attacks on immigrant communities escalate, or will this moment open space for something different? What Bad Bunny did was more than perform—it unlocked a new level of resistance: one that won’t ask permission, won’t translate, won’t soften, and won’t explain itself. Whatever comes next, one thing is clear: the mythology of Manifest Destiny has been disrupted, its certainty shaken in ways that cannot be ignored.