Super Bowl

New & Noteworthy

In case you missed it, the Super Bowl was this weekend. Read up on some of TSP’s Super Bowl-related sociology here. We also have a new Discovery on the NFL’s Rooney Rule by TSP board member Nadia Jackson-Fitch from work by Christopher I. Rider, James B. Wade, Anand Swaminathan, and Andreas Schwab in the American Journal of Sociology, using promotion data on NFL coaches from 1985-2015.

From the Archives

Does Blindness Beat Bias? by Evan Stewart in Sociological Images on one dating reality show, Love is Blind, that eliminates visual cues (new season coming out this Valentines’ Day).

No presidential debates for the 2024 election? Polls may indicate little impact, but remember polls aren’t always the most reliable representations of data. Read this piece from Contexts on who chooses to participate in online political polls by Danielle Koonce.

More from our Partners & Community Pages

Contexts latest:

• How does parenting impact happiness? Read how different groups experience happiness and parenting differently by Parker Muzzerall.
• Stephanie Ternullo interviewed over 50 residents of Motorville Wisconsin about how local organizations’ contexts, organized labor, and other aspects of rural America strengthen progressive politics or shifts towards populism.

First Publics has two new Class Notes:

• Anna Rogers writes about the importance of incorporating popular culture in the classroom to engage, enhance learning, and encourage critical thinking.
• Shelby Clark discusses her using Community-Based-Learning in a sociology class and how it can further involve students to get engaged in their communities.

Sociological Images has a new piece on how Large Language Models can have an impact on society and religion by Evan Stewart.

Okay, I’ll make this quick since it’s a bit dated. After I wrote that little post about Saturday Night Live’s “Beyonce is Black” spoof a couple of weeks back, I had a number of students and friends wanting to know what I actually thought about her Superbowl performance (well, her part in the Coldplay performance featuring Beyonce and Bruno Mars). I’m no music critic (or big Beyonce fan, for that matter) so I hadn’t really taken the bait. However, I did spend some time reading what other people were saying—both about the performance and about the backlash it seems Beyonce experienced.

One piece that really caught my attention was by the Salon blogger Lasha. She was struck by the very different reception that Beyonce experienced than the one that met rapper Kendrick Lamar after his racially pointed and politically charged performance at the Grammys just days later. According to Lasha, it was one more instance of the unfair, sexist policing of African American women’s political expression.

Lasha’s point about the marginalization of black women’s radicalism is well-taken. I also think there is some additional social context worth considering. For one, there are expectations and previous record. I think part of the thing with Beyonce is that her Superbowl performance was perhaps her first “socially conscious art.” This surprised folks—it defied their expectations of the “Single Ladies” singer, upsetting those who didn’t see it coming or didn’t understand where she was coming from (witness my previous post on the SNL spoof).

Even more important, in my view, is the actual social context of the performances: the music industry versus the sportsworld. We Americans have come to expect and accept social consciousness and political radicalism in the music context. We not only do not expect such expression in sports, we actually oppose it. Not all cultural arenas are unique, and there are many things about the world of sport that make it uniquely powerful and complicated. As I written on many occasions—for example, in the piece Kyle Green and I did on this site about politics and sport being strange bedfellows—there are deep cultural norms about sport that make any kind of social statement in the realm of sport extremely complicated and typically controversial, especially where race is involved.

I won’t try to rehearse all of the ways this works, much less how racial movements and politics are implicated (there’s a lot on this in my book on the 1968 African American Olympic protests, if you are interested). But when it comes to statements of protest, unrest, and activism, Americans tend to see sport as somehow unique or special—either because we see sport as somehow sacred or sacrosanct (that is, above politics) or because don’t want our entertainment complicated or sullied by the realities of the non-sport world. So while sexism is clearly at play, there’s at least one other important thing going on—the idealization of sport on its highest, most holy day in America: Super Bowl Sunday.

This week, on The Editors’ Desk*, Doug Hartmann enumerated and tried to define** six elements of the sociological worldview. Elsewhere on The Society Pages, our many contributors worked to demonstrate that worldview—enjoy!

*That’s right: we all share one desk. It’s adorable. Possibly even adorkable.

**See what I did there? The man never met a conjunction he didn’t like. more...