Thursday Jay-Z and National Football League Commissioner Roger Goodell held a news conference announcing a deal with the league in which the hip-hop mogul’s company will handle the NFL’s entertainment events with a purported nod toward enhancing a message of social justice. This is a coup for Goodell and the league, which has been under fire from both sides of the political spectrum over the NFL’s reaction to Colin Kaepernick’s protest of racial injustice by kneeling during the national anthem. Trump and conservatives have used the anthem protests as a wedge issue for the culture war in order to stoke white resentment among the Republican base, with the resulting firestorms leading many of those making money decisions in the sports industry to scurry away from either covering, discussing, or wanting to involve themselves in political discussions. ESPN’s Dan Le Batard recently defied the network’s edict of “no politics” by calling out Trump’s racism, and called ESPN’s reluctance to cover those issues directly “cowardly.”
Even as the anthem protests have become more widespread, with Megan Rapinoe of the U.S. women’s national team during the World Cup and Race Imboden at the Pan American Games, Kaepernick has remained unsigned to any NFL team since 2017, and other players have been frozen out and found it difficult to work in the league for their support of the protests. Over these past years of controversy, celebrities have offered differing degrees of solidarity with Kaepernick, usually by refusing to be a part of NFL events. Both Rihanna and Cardi B reportedly turned down an offer to perform at the Super Bowl halftime show because of the appearance of supporting the NFL after its treatment of Kaepernick. In public performances and some of his music, Jay-Z has in the past turned down offers to perform with the NFL and publicly supported the stance taken by Kapernick, calling him “an iconic figure.” For Beyoncé’s and Jay-Z’s 2018 track “Apeshit,” Jay-Z called out the NFL with this: “Once I said no to the Super Bowl: You need me, I don’t need you. Every night we in the end zone. Tell the NFL we in stadiums too.”
But that support only seems to go so far. Jay-Z’s decision to partner with the NFL has faced intense blowback from critics who believe collaboration with the league allows the powers that be to sidestep Kaepernick’s protest, and the NFL will use Jay-Z as an imprimatur to shut down any criticism of how the NFL handles the intersection of politics and sport, especially if team owners enforce edicts which silence players. For his part, Jay-Z claims “we’re past the point of kneeling” and his deal with the NFL is about “action.”