Our Contradictions: Enemy of White Supremacy Culture

White supremacy culture teaches us that there is one correct way to be human. One moral position that, if chosen properly, will place us on the “good” side of history. This framework is deceptively comforting. It promises clarity in a world that is anything but clear. It offers certainty in exchange for obedience. It flattens the vast, contradictory terrain of human experience into something manageable, legible, and controllable.

People are not built that way.

We are inconsistent. We hold competing truths at the same time. We love the things that harm us. We survive inside systems we know to be violent. We make compromises not because we are ignorant or malicious, but because we are human—because survival under capitalism, colonialism, and racial hierarchy is never cut and dry. To demand purity from people living inside impure systems is not ethical rigor. It is denial.

White supremacy culture depends on binary thinking: either/or, right/wrong, good/bad, victim/perpetrator. These binaries are not neutral tools for analysis; they are mechanisms of control. When the world is divided cleanly into moral camps, there is no room to interrogate power, context, coercion, or constraint. There is only compliance or punishment.

This is why contradiction feels so threatening.

When confronted with cognitive dissonance—two truths that cannot be easily reconciled—many white people shut down. They dig their heels into whichever position feels most familiar, comfortable, or most sanctioned by dominant culture, even when they know, on some level, that it is incomplete or wrong. This response is not an individual failure of character; it is an inherited strategy under white supremacy culture. Ambiguity is framed as danger. Nuance is treated as a weakness. Changing one’s mind is cast as weakness rather than growth.

The result is a politics of rigidity. People become more invested in being right than in being in right relationship. Conversations collapse into call-outs. Complexity is mistaken for cowardice. The demand for ideological consistency replaces any meaningful engagement with how harm actually operates in the world.

This dynamic is especially visible when contradictions become public—when they appear at scale, under bright lights, in places where millions are watching. Rather than sitting with the discomfort of unresolved tension, white supremacy culture urges us to resolve it immediately by choosing a side. To condemn or endorse. To cancel or defend. To declare something wholly liberatory or wholly corrupt.

However, contradiction does not disappear just because we refuse to look at it.

In fact, insisting there is one right way to be liberatory often reproduces the very logics we claim to oppose. This politic mirrors white supremacy culture’s obsession with control, order, and hierarchy. They reward those with the most access to distance themselves from harm, and punish those who must navigate proximity to power in order to survive. They ignore the uneven distribution of choice—who can opt out, who can disengage, who can afford refusal.

Under capitalism, no participation is fully ethical. Every consumption decision, every form of visibility, every cultural exchange is contaminated by exploitation somewhere along the supply chain. Pretending otherwise does not make us more righteous; it simply makes us less honest. Honesty is a prerequisite for any politics that claims to be about liberation.

To accept contradiction is not to abandon ethics; it is an invitation to deepen them. It is to acknowledge that liberation is not a destination we arrive at by choosing correctly, but a practice we return to again and again, often while standing in impossible places. It requires us to hold “both/and” rather than retreat into “either/or.” It asks us to stay present even when there is no clean resolution, no morally satisfying conclusion.

I write from that premise: that our contradictions are not evidence of our failure, but evidence of our humanity. The refusal to tolerate those contradictions—especially when they are visible, collective, and uncomfortable—is one of white supremacy culture’s most effective tools.

I do not believe the Super Bowl should exist.

This is not a casual objection, nor a moral quibble about taste or entertainment. The Super Bowl is the culmination of an industry that has long relied on the exploitation, disciplining, and destruction of Black bodies for profit. It is a spectacle built on the normalization of violence, framed as sport, patriotism, and tradition. Its proximity to militarism—the flyovers, the recruitment ads, the ritualized nationalism—is not incidental. It is an extension of the military-industrial complex, dressed up as a celebration. In this sense, the Super Bowl is not merely a game. It is a continuation of Empire.

American football has often been described as a modern form of ownership. Black men are drafted, trained, and managed as assets. Their bodies are pushed past endurance, traded between owners, and discarded when no longer profitable. The long-term neurological damage, shortened life expectancy, and quiet suffering that follow retirement are treated as unfortunate but acceptable externalities. This logic echoes older forms of racialized spectacle—Mandingo fighting, plantation violence staged for entertainment—where harm is rendered invisible by the crowd’s pleasure.

From this vantage point, any participation in the Super Bowl appears ethically compromised. The stage itself is contaminated. The institution cannot be separated from the violence that sustains it. To perform there is, at minimum, to brush up against that legacy.

This is where contradiction enters—not as a loophole, but as a reality we must sit with rather than resolve too quickly.

The Super Bowl is one of the largest platforms on earth. It is a site of forced visibility, where millions of people—many of whom do not otherwise seek out political art, protest music, or radical critique—are watching. To dismiss this scale outright is to misunderstand how power circulates in a media-saturated world. Visibility does not equal endorsement, but it does create openings that matter.

The refusal to acknowledge this tension is often framed as moral clarity. But it is, more accurately, an insistence on ideological comfort. It allows people to say, “The Super Bowl is bad, therefore nothing that happens there can be meaningful,” and exit the conversation without grappling with what it means to intervene from inside a violent structure. This move feels principled, but it often functions as avoidance.

What does it mean to leverage a corrupt platform to tell an inconvenient truth? Is that collaboration, or infiltration? Is protest only valid when it occurs outside the machine, or can it exist in friction with it—visible, compromised, and still necessary?

White supremacy culture prefers the former framing because it preserves clean lines. It allows us to sort actions neatly into categories: ethical or unethical, resistance or complicity. Real life rarely offers such clarity. Most acts of survival, especially for colonized and racialized people, take place under conditions we did not choose. Demanding that resistance be pure before it is recognized is another way of denying its existence altogether.

This does not mean that every performance at the Super Bowl is automatically radical or worthy of praise. It means only that refusing to examine what happens there—because the institution itself is violent—limits our political imagination. It forecloses questions that are uncomfortable but necessary: Who gets access to visibility? Who decides what messages are allowed to circulate? What does it mean when protest is smuggled into the heart of Empire, even temporarily?

The Super Bowl is a site of contradiction because it is a site of power. To engage with it honestly requires holding two truths at once: that the institution is fundamentally unethical, and that people operating within it may still create moments of rupture, critique, and collective recognition. The task is not to resolve this tension, but to remain with it—to refuse false comforts in favor of a more demanding human ethics.

When Bad Bunny stepped onto the Super Bowl stage, he did not transform the institution into something ethical. The violence embedded in the spectacle did not evaporate because a Puerto Rican artist was centered. The NFL did not become accountable to the people whose bodies and lands it exploits. The Super Bowl remained what it is.

Still, something happened.

Bad Bunny’s performance operated as protest art not because it existed outside power, but because it refused to be neutral inside it. It was an act of critical visibility—one that leveraged a platform designed for distraction to insist on remembrance. His presence pulled Puerto Rico into a space that routinely erases it, flattening the island into either a vacation fantasy or a forgotten disaster zone. In doing so, the performance disrupted the illusion that entertainment exists apart from politics.

Puerto Rico’s ongoing energy and electrical crises are not accidents. They are the predictable outcomes of colonial extraction, privatization, and abandonment. For years, blackouts have shaped daily life on the island while U.S. media cycles move on. By centering Puerto Rican culture, language, and sound at one of the most-watched events in the world, Bad Bunny forced a moment of collective attention—brief, imperfect, and still meaningful.

A common critique emerges quickly: protest that occurs on a corporate stage is not “real” protest. Art that circulates through capital is inherently compromised. Visibility gained through Empire is tainted beyond redemption. These critiques are not wrong, but they are incomplete. They collapse analysis into a single axis—participation equals complicity—and ignore how power actually functions in a global media economy.

Bad Bunny did not choose the conditions under which Puerto Rico exists, nor did he create the structures that limit how its stories are told. What he did choose was to refuse silence. To insist that Puerto Rican identity, joy, rage, and survival belong in spaces that were never built to hold them. That insistence matters, even when it is compromised.

White supremacy culture has groomed us to struggle with making sense of this kind of intervention because it demands resolution. It asks: Is this good or bad? Ethical or unethical? Resistance or collaboration? But these questions assume a world where refusal is always available, where protest can remain small, pure, and untouched by power. That world does not exist for most people living under Empire.

For colonized peoples, especially, survival has always required navigating contradiction. To pretend otherwise is to impose standards of resistance shaped by privilege—the privilege of opting out, of remaining unseen, of choosing silence without consequence. This does not mean we suspend critique. It means we sharpen it.

The question is not whether Bad Bunny’s performance was perfectly ethical. No such performance could be. The question is whether we are capable of recognizing protest that does not arrive in the form we are most comfortable with. Whether we can hold the reality that an act can be both compromised and meaningful at the same time. Whether we can acknowledge that visibility, while never sufficient on its own, can still function as a rupture in a culture built on erasure.

Refusing to engage this complexity often serves white supremacy culture more than it serves liberation. It allows us to retreat into certainty rather than responsibility. To declare ourselves morally absolute while leaving the conditions that produce harm untouched. To demand that artists dismantle systems singlehandedly before we take their interventions seriously.

Bad Bunny’s performance does not resolve the violence of the Super Bowl or absolve the NFL. It does not fix Puerto Rico’s electrical grid. But it does expose the lie that protest must be quiet, marginal, or free from contradiction to count. It insists that even within the machine, there are moments where something else can be named—where memory interrupts spectacle, and presence interrupts forgetting.

If Bad Bunny’s performance at the Super Bowl is instructive, it is not simply because it was a political performance in a moment of heightened culture-war conflict. It is instructive because it reveals who gets to be seen, heard, and counted in a culture that claims universal visibility while systematically excluding whole communities.

Bad Bunny’s halftime show was layered with references to Puerto Rican culture, history, and struggle. His use of symbolism matters because it centers material reality alongside spectacle. It refuses the idea that culture can be separated from the political and economic conditions that shape real lives. But it also raises important questions about access: who sees these gestures, who benefits from them, and who gets to participate in the cultural economy that surrounds them?

Bad Bunny is one of the most-streamed artists in the world, a globally recognized figure with massive commercial reach and cultural capital. That visibility itself is a form of access—access to audiences, platforms, and resources that most artists and communities will never have. The Super Bowl stage amplified that access exponentially, turning what might have been a niche critique into a conversation that dominated national headlines and political commentary.

Contrast that with the lived experience of many Puerto Ricans, especially those in low-income or rural parts of the island who continue to live without reliable power, adequate housing, or basic infrastructure. The performance’s meaning, therefore, becomes entangled with its conditions of accessibility: who gets full stadium tickets—or even the ability to live in a world where a high-budget stage exists at all? Who consumes performance as spectacle, and who experiences the real, ongoing crises that the symbolism gestures toward?

This tension is not unique to Bad Bunny; it is structural. Under capitalism, visibility and access are unevenly distributed. Cultural artifacts circulate globally when backed by capital, connections, and infrastructure. But the communities they claim to represent often remain at the margins of economic power. To celebrate representation without interrogating who can afford to participate in the economy of representation is to replicate the very hierarchies the performance criticizes.

This is where contradiction thickens.

Is Bad Bunny’s performance less meaningful because it took place on a corporate stage? No—meaning does not depend on ethical purity. Is it unproblematic that people with substantial wealth and access can translate political critique into massive visibility? No—unequal access should always be scrutinized. These truths coexist, and we cannot make them go away by insisting on a single interpretive frame.

The most compelling critiques of Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl performance have come not only from outside the community, but from within it. Many Black, Indigenous, and POC viewers recognized the violence of the institution immediately and questioned whether protest inside such a space risks legitimizing it. That skepticism does not come from political naivety. It comes from memory.

Disagreement among marginalized people is often treated as a problem to be solved rather than a reality to be understood. White supremacy culture expects coherence: one correct analysis, one appropriate response, one unified position. But shared oppression does not produce identical political strategies. It never has. Survival under Empire has always required multiple, sometimes conflicting approaches.

For some, Bad Bunny’s performance represented an interruption. For others, it felt like extraction—another moment where colonized pain circulates as representation packaged back to us through capitalism. These positions are not opposites. They are parallel responses to the same conditions.

The tension here is not between ethics and apathy. It is between different relationships to compromise.

For those who have watched symbolic recognition repeatedly fail to produce material change, refusal becomes a form of protection. Skepticism is not rigidity; it is evidence. At the same time, for artists whose communities are already marginalized by language, race, and colonial status, disengagement from dominant platforms often guarantees invisibility. Access to scale is not evenly distributed, nor are the consequences of opting out.

Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl performance does not resolve this tension. It exposes it.

The reality is less satisfying and more honest: visibility without accountability is insufficient, and refusal does not dismantle power on its own. Protest inside the machine risks cooptation. Protest outside it risks disappearance. There is no perfect position from which to stand.

What matters is not arriving at consensus, but remaining capable of holding contradiction without turning on one another. That capacity to disagree without demanding moral hierarchy is itself a refusal of white supremacy culture. The moment that refusal falters is often the moment contradiction becomes visible at scale.

Scale becomes a moral trigger.

A single performance watched by millions is easier to scrutinize than the countless everyday decisions that also sustain harm. A visible artist is more accessible to condemnation than an invisible supply chain. Spectacle draws attention away from systems and toward individuals, even when those individuals did not create the conditions they are navigating.

This displacement is not accidental. It is the result of hyper-individualism—an ideology that frames social harm as the outcome of personal choice rather than structural design. Under this logic, responsibility is assigned downward. Artists are blamed for performing. Consumers are blamed for buying. Individuals are told that ethical living is a matter of correct decision-making, as though freedom of choice exists equally across class, race, and colonial status. The result is a politics of blame that serves elite interests.

Corporations and governing institutions benefit when harm is framed as the cumulative effect of bad personal choices rather than the predictable outcome of profit-driven systems. Hyper-individualism obscures power by insisting that everyone is equally responsible, even when access, options, and consequences are radically uneven. It turns systemic violence into a moral failing of ordinary people, while leaving the architects of extraction untouched.

Consider how normalized consumption operates. Millions of people eat fast food daily despite knowing it is exploitative and environmentally destructive. This is not because they are unethical. It is because food deserts exist, time is scarce, and wages are low. Convenience is engineered. Yet these everyday decisions rarely provoke the same outrage as a single, highly visible cultural event. They are too ordinary and too embedded in survival to be framed as a moral crisis.

Scale, then, is not the same as harm. It is simply more legible.

White supremacy culture prefers to police what is seen rather than what is sustained. It trains us to fixate on moments of contradiction that become public, while ignoring the slow violence that unfolds quietly and continuously. This is why artists operating at scale are so often treated as ethical stand-ins. They become proxies onto which collective anxiety about capitalism, Empire, and complicity is projected.

Bad Bunny’s performance is not uniquely unethical because it was large. It is simply easier to locate discomfort in one event than to confront the broader reality of our collective lack of choice and consent under our capitalist system. 

I do not mean that artists should be exempt from critique. It means critique must be proportionate and structurally grounded. Asking whether visibility produces accountability is different from demanding silence. Interrogating access is different from assigning blame. When critique collapses into condemnation, it stops being analytical and starts functioning as a release valve for collective frustration.

Hyper-individualism thrives on this collapse. It encourages people to turn inward, to police one another’s choices, and to mistake personal righteousness for political action. Meanwhile, the systems that constrain those choices remain intact.

The more productive question is not whether Bad Bunny should have performed or whether any artist should engage with platforms shaped by capitalism. The question is why we are more comfortable blaming individuals for navigating contradiction than we are in challenging the structures that make contradiction unavoidable. Why visibility provokes outrage while normalization produces silence.

If contradiction is inevitable under current conditions, then ethical practice cannot be about achieving purity. It must be about orientation: where attention is directed, how power is named, and whether critique moves upward or sideways. The refusal to scapegoat individuals for systemic harm is not a retreat from accountability. It is a refusal to let elite power off the hook.

White supremacy culture teaches us to mistake certainty for ethics. It promises that if we choose the correct position, align ourselves with the right analysis, and reject whatever appears contaminated, we will be absolved. This promise is a lie. There is no position outside contradiction from which liberation can be cleanly delivered.

To be human under capitalism, colonialism, and racial hierarchy is to live inside compromise. Our lives are shaped by systems we did not design and cannot dismantle alone. We participate because participation is often the condition of survival. To acknowledge this is not to surrender to inevitability; it is to refuse the fantasy that perfection is available to us.

This refusal matters, especially in moments when culture becomes loud—when art reaches millions, when protest is visible, when contradiction cannot be hidden. The work, then, is not to eliminate contradiction but to remain in relationship with it.

This requires a different political posture—one that can hold “both/and” without rushing toward resolution. Yes, the Super Bowl is an extension of racialized spectacle and militarism. And yes, Bad Bunny used its scale to insist on Puerto Rican presence, memory, and survival. Both are true. Refusing one truth in favor of the other does not make one more principled; it simply makes the world smaller.

As Nina Simone famously said, an artist’s duty is to reflect the times. In an era defined by globalization, virality, and platform economies, reflecting the times necessarily involves contradiction. Artists do not choose the conditions under which their work circulates; they respond to them. To demand political expression without reach is to demand silence by another name.

This does not mean that scale absolves responsibility. It means that responsibility must be situated. Visibility is not the same as liberation, representation is not a substitute for material change, but neither are they meaningless. They are part of how people recognize themselves, locate one another, and imagine beyond isolation.

What ultimately weakens white supremacy culture is not perfect alignment, but expanded capacity: the capacity to hold complexity without shutting down, to critique without erasing, to disagree without ranking one another’s ethics. Community is not built through consensus alone; it is built through endurance—through the willingness to stay present when the answers are incomplete.

Our contradictions are not evidence of failure. They are evidence that we are alive, thinking, and resisting simplification in a world that depends on it. To hold them openly, without demanding purity or punishment, is not a retreat from liberation. It is one of its necessary conditions.

Author’s Note

This essay does not seek to resolve the contradictions it names. It is written from the belief that contradiction is not a moral failure, but a condition of being human. I am interested less in prescribing the “correct” political response than in examining why we demand certainty from one another in systems that offer none.

The questions raised here—about scale, visibility, access, protest, and compromise—are not abstract. They emerge from watching how quickly disagreement turns into hierarchy, especially when culture becomes loud and public. I offer this essay as an invitation to pause and sit with discomfort rather than rush towards a conclusion, and to consider how our shared refusal of contradiction often mirrors the very logics we claim to resist.

This piece is not an argument for participation, nor a defense of institutions that cause harm. It is a call to examine where we direct blame, how we measure ethics, and what becomes possible when we allow ourselves and one another to remain unfinished.