The specific and veiled bigoted feedback that permeated tv, radio airwaves, and social media, earlier than and after the halftime efficiency of Benito Antonio Martinez Ocasio — higher often called Unhealthy Bunny — demonstrated the angst, worry and ignorance of those that reject the idea and actuality of a multi-ethnic, multicultural nation.
Nothing greater than sports activities and music illuminate the bond of the Afro-Latino diaspora. Unhealthy Bunny’s present on the sector of Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, California, this previous Sunday on the midpoint of the Seattle Seahawks 29-13 win in Tremendous Bowl LX (60) was replete with social, political and cultural references, celebrating the 31 yr previous’s homeland of Puerto Rico, in addition to the inextricably related bonds between Africans and Latin Individuals, whose ancestry is deeply rooted.
Sports activities tells us so, as Baseball Corridor of Famers, the late Roberto Clemente and David Ortiz, hailing from Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic respectively, amongst many extra, replicate the simple African blood that runs by way of numerous Latinos who’ve been instrumental in shaping the historical past of American sports activities.
Clemente, one of many best proper fielders of all time enjoying for the Pittsburgh Pirates from 1955 to 1972, brazenly expressed pleasure in his African and Spanish heritage. His pores and skin darkish and clean, Clemente skilled racism for the primary time in his life when he arrived in america in 1954 from his birthplace of Carolina, Puerto Rico to play within the minor leagues.
4 hundred years earlier, within the 1500s, African slaves arrived from West Africa in Carolina, on the island’s northeastern coast, to supply labor for Spanish colonial rulers. Below the brutal rule of conquistadors corresponding to Christopher Columbus in Hispaniola, hundreds of thousands of Tainos and different Indigenous folks within the area had been practically eradicated after being enslaved.
Clemente grew to become a shining image and illustration of Afro-Latinos as a humanitarian and advocate of racial equality. He deeply admired and infrequently quoted Martin Luther King Jr.
Unhealthy Bunny, who has sat courtside this season at a number of Knicks video games with Bronx-born rapper Fats Joe, has introduced consideration to the social and financial plight of Puerto Rico. Accordingly, as he did on Sunday with pulsating Afro-Latino beats, instructive lyrics and fascinating imagery, he delivered a message of diasporic unity to some 128.2 million viewers — the fourth-most watched halftime present in Tremendous Bowl historical past. And he used sports activities because the platform to do it.
