Proud Boys musta had trouble keeping their moonshine down during this year's highly entertaining Super Bowl halftime show. Hey, y'all, this glitz bomb was a promo for black succession! Or co-optation.
Some points.
* More than two-thirds of NFL players are black. Nearly all NFL head coaches are white.
* The halftime performers -- Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg, Mary J. Blige, Kendrick Lamar, 50 Cent and Eminem -- were all black except Eminem (the only one who took a knee).
* African-American musicians and dancers dominated a panorama drenched in white (or "bone"-colored, as the event's Caucasian stage conceptualist, Es Devlin, described it). Structures representing iconic Compton businesses were painted white. Dre played a white piano. Lamar's all-black dancers had white hair. Blige wore a streaming white wig and an all-white outfit. Three white '63 Chevy Impalas idled in front.
* As the white wall before him exploded into fragments, black-hooded Eminem rapped, "You have one opportunity to seize everything you ever wanted." Snoop: "Believe in your strength." Dre: "Pimps be on a mission for them greens."
* Super Bowl LVI was held in $5 billion SoFi Stadium, named after an online personal-finance company and built with private funds raised by the L.A. Rams' owner, billionaire developer Stan Kroenke. Although Inglewood mayor James T. Butts Jr. has promoted the new venue as a godsend for his city, not all residents are genuflecting. (Read Erin Aubry Kaplan's L.A. Times opinion piece here.)
* Sidelight: The halftime show was sponsored by Pepsi, which underwrites an opportunity program called Racial Equality Journey. Conversely, Pepsi still trails only Coca-Cola among the world's top food-producing polluters. When half a century ago Sly Stone sang, "I switched from Coke to Pep," he meant he now preferred amphetamines over cocaine. Pepsi can brag, with equal transcendence: At least we're not Coke.
* The Super Bowl's long-delayed acknowledgment of hip-hop happened in Black History Month.
The message: The white dream is money. Black Americans can appropriate the white dream. And when that happens, equality will prevail -- among those who've bought in. As practical and undogmatic as that reasoning may ring, it's still a burr in the Stetsons of many cowboys. They know it's better to stay the way they are: more equal.