- By Marc Sandalow | Examiner columnist |
- Feb 7, 2025 Updated Feb 7, 2025 (SFExaminer.com)
If I can bring myself to watch the Super Bowl on Sunday, I’ll be thinking of a particular episode of “The Twilight Zone.”
”It’s a Good Life,” which aired more than 60 years ago, features a young boy who has the power and inclination to kill, mutilate, burn or banish to the cornfield anyone who displeases him. When a neighbor defiantly sings a verse from “You Are My Sunshine” — offending the child’s delicate sensibilities — the boy transforms him into a jack-in-the-box, prompting the horrified townspeople, terrified they will be next, to tell the child what a wonderful thing he has done.
“It’s good what you’ve done to Dan,” they tell him. “Just swell. That was really good.”
Like the timid characters in Rod Serling’s fictional town, institutions across the country are scrubbing any mention of their efforts to combat racism, prejudice and inaccessibility for fear of offending the new president’s sensibilities.
The National Football League is the latest to bow down, announcing the same day President Donald Trump said he’d attend Sunday’s game in New Orleans that it would replace the phrase “End Racism,” — which has been stenciled into the end zone at each of the last four Super Bowls — with “Choose Love.”
Stenciling any message except team logos in the end zone seems silly to me. The instinct to cram propaganda — whether it be product advertising or popular groupthink — into anything that captures eyeballs is an annoyance. And I’ve got nothing against choosing love.
However, to remove “End Racism” weeks after Trump ordered all government agencies to end diversity, equity and inclusion policies and remove any mention from websites, reeks of knee-jerk fealty to the president’s worst instincts.
Despite Trump’s innuendos, DEI done properly does not advance incompetence. The Federal Aviation Administration, for example, does not promote blind people or incompetent women to become air-traffic controllers. At the same time, if the applicant pool is two-thirds men, it stands to reason that encouraging more women to enter the field will boost the talent to choose from.
A day before the announcement, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell said the league would continue its DEI efforts. The league insists that the stencil removal has nothing to do with Trump but instead is in response to the California fires, New Orleans truck attack, and plane crashes in Washington and Philadelphia, all of which require love.
Put me down as skeptical.
Even if true, taking such a step this week creates the unmistakable impression that the NFL is bowing down to the misguided outbursts of a president who clings to the belief that encouraging diversity — a fundamental step in ending racism — is responsible for last month’s tragedy, let alone an inefficient government and weak military.
It’s reminiscent of The Washington Post announcing two weeks before the November election — with an editorial endorsing former Vice President Kamala Harris ready to go — that it would no longer endorse presidential candidates, only to see owner Jeff Bezos — whose other companies have billions of dollars in government contracts — sitting just feet from Trump at his inauguration.
Or of ABC News agreeing to pay Trump $15 million toward his presidential library settle a frivolous defamation lawsuit many lawyers said they were at no risk of losing.
It’s particularly troubling when it comes from the NFL, a multibillion-dollar enterprise that enriches its overwhelmingly white ownership through the exploits of its majority African American players.
This is the same league that promoted its Monday Night Football games for years with a singer whose hits included “If the South Wouda Won,” which fantasizes about the Confederacy winning the Civil War.
The NFL also instituted a policy in 2018 requiring all players and staff to “stand and show respect for the flag and the anthem” when “The Star-Spangled Banner” is played. This was a direct response to the preponderance of players kneeling during the national anthem to protest the murder of Black men by police officers, a demonstration that former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick originated.
The “End Racism” stencil was first displayed in the aftermath of the Minneapolis police murder of George Floyd in 2020, and the further rise of the Black Lives Matter movement that year. Some Trump supporters have feigned outrage at the movement, insisting that “All Lives Matter.”
Of course they do. That’s beside the point.
Are bumper stickers that read “Fight Cancer” offensive? Of course not. They don’t diminish the importance of ending AIDS or other diseases, just as “Black Lives Matter” doesn’t diminish the importance of all lives.
By the end of “The Twilight Zone” episode, the child has turned his family’s pigs into monsters, burned a playmate, killed most of the town’s dogs, and created a snowstorm that will kill half the town’s crops. “It was a real good thing that he done that,” his father says, as the scared people around him shake their heads in agreement.
We are not yet living in “The Twilight Zone.” Trump won the election and has the authority to eliminate many of the executive branch’s anti-racism policies. However, those outside the federal government are under no obligation to do the same.
Trump does not have the power to turn dissenters into jack-in-the-boxes or banish them to the cornfields. Not yet. We still live in a country where we are allowed to say “End Racism.”
Marc Sandalow is a senior faculty member at the University of California’s Washington Program. He has been writing about California politics from Washington, D.C., for more than 30 years.
