A few days before last Sunday’s Super Bowl, a pair of Canadian professors focused on what really was important at American football’s biggest event: racial messaging.
Before the title game, the National Football League had decided to ditch displays of “End Racism” in the field’s end zones, the first time since 2021.
In its place the league went with “Choose Love” and “It Takes All of Us.”
But for Brock University professor Janelle Joseph, whose research is “situated at the intersection of Black Studies, Health Sciences and Sport Management to enable storytelling about uninhibited joy, abiding colonialism, and steadfast resistance of racialized peoples,” the move was “emblematic” of the NFL’s “performative actions” in the social justice realm.