Rihanna will headline the Super Bowl LVII halftime show next February. The move is surprising because in 2019, she claimed she rejected an offer to perform the Super Bowl halftime show to show solidarity with Colin Kaepernick. With the Kaepernick saga further in the past, she must have stopped caring about him.
In the November 2019 edition of Vogue, Rihanna, who is from Barbados, told the magazine she turned down an offer to perform at the Super Bowl LIII halftime show because of the way the league had treated Kaepernick. She said she thought performing at the game would make her a sellout.
“I couldn’t dare do that,” she told Vogue. “For what? Who gains from that? Not my people. I just couldn’t be a sellout. I couldn’t be an enabler. There’s things within that organization that I do not agree with at all, and I was not about to go and be of service to them in any way.”
If that’s her position, that’s fine. Rihanna has the right to think Kaepernick belongs in the NFL. She can support what he did: kneeling for the national anthem during the 2016 NFL season. All 32 NFL teams seem to disagree with her, because it was detrimental to the league’s ratings and public image. Therefore, they have a right not to sign Kaepernick.
However, nothing has changed for Kaepernick since his tumultuous 2016 season ended. He still wants to play in the NFL, and no teams have an interest in signing him. He went unsigned in 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, and 2021.
Plus, he remains unsigned this season. Just because Kaepernick’s relevance has gradually faded over the past several years, that doesn’t mean the argument for or against him has changed.
Perhaps Rihanna didn’t mean what she said at the time, or she changed her mind. Whatever changed, at least Rihanna is effectively on the right side of the debate now. Kaepernick was bad for the game, so the league wants nothing to do with him. Police brutality and racial inequality exist in our society, but his divisive actions on the gridiron did nothing to change those problems.
Tom Joyce (@TomJoyceSports) is a political reporter for the New Boston Post in Massachusetts.
