Why Aren’t There More Black Figure Skaters At The Olympics?

Today I direct your attention to a piece at NBC Sports which discusses this issue. It is easy to say that figure skating is just not valued in black culture in many places, and while that may be true it is not the whole truth. The full truth is that there are many barriers to entry for black people in figure skating, owing to white supremacy and racial segregation. These barriers include not only direct discrimination, such as blacks being denied access to skating rinks in the past, but also the standards of what is considered appropriate, which are skewed very heavily toward whiteness and white supremacy.

Read: Why Aren’t There More Black Figure Skaters At The Winter Olympics?

During the Super Bowl Halftime Show, This Happened

Last night’s Super Bowl halftime show featured five top black hip-hop artists.

Kendrick Lamar was among that number. He performed his best-known hit “Alright”, a protest song written in the aftermath of the police murder of Michael Brown and subsequent protests in Ferguson back in 2014. The song has a line in it which goes “And we hate po-po / Wanna kill us dead in the street fo sho”. That line was sung, but with an absence blatantly noticeable to anyone who knows the song.

This happened only days after Minneapolis police murdered Amir Locke, which happened just over a year and a half after they murdered George Floyd.

While I am deeply disappointed, I cannot say I am surprised. After all, this is AmeriKKKa, as Ice-T would call it. People who look like me will kill you dead in the streets for sure, then have the nerve to demand that you censor yourself when singing about it on a public stage.

This is what Kendrick Lamar performed at the Super Bowl:

And here is the song as it is supposed to go: