Last week, the NFL announced that Bad Bunny will headline the 2026 Super Bowl halftime show. And, predictably, the internet lost its mind– though the reasons for the outrage are revealing in themselves.

Let us be clear: this isn’t about talent. Bad Bunny has literally sold out stadiums, broken streaming records, and built a career that spans genres and borders. The anger is not about his music. It’s about who he is. He’s Puerto Rican. He sings primarily in Spanish. And, for some Americans, that alone seems to make him unworthy of one of the country’s most visible cultural stages.

Scroll through X or Instagram, and, well, it’s difficult not to notice the recurring themes. “Not American enough,” “too foreign,” “we need a white performer,” “who even understands him?” Even our darling president, Trump, weighed in with his usual benevolence: “I’ve never heard of him. I don’t know who he is…I don’t know why they’re doing it…I think it’s absolutely ridiculous.” Just take a look at some of these posts on X.

Anyway, the underlying pattern is unmistakable: this is about race and language. Not about whether the choreography is good, not about whether the songs will get people moving– it’s about the fact that Bad Bunny is not the kind of performer some Americans have been trained to expect: white and English-speaking.

It’s exhausting how predictable it is. The same debates happen whenever someone who doesn’t fit the narrow mold of “American acceptability” is put front and center. Bad Bunny does not fit that mold. He doesn’t need to. He is unapologetically Latinx. He represents a culture that has always been present in America but has rarely been given this kind of stage. And that is enough to make some– no, lots of people angry.

What’s remarkable–  and incredibly sad– is the way this backlash so clearly exposes people’s mass bias towards white artists. People act like they are outraged about fairness or quality, but notice how rarely that outrage shows up when white performers dominate year after year, taking the spotlight while Latinx, Black, and other nonwhite voices are sidelined. This is not a new phenomenon. It’s been baked into American culture for decades: the most visible spaces are reserved for white performers, and when someone else takes that stage, it is framed as a disruption or even a threat.

And yet, amid all the outrage, there’s pride and excitement that is impossible to ignore! I love Bad Bunny and his music– I was thrilled when I heard the announcement. Latinx fans, and fans of music generally, are thrilled. Finally, someone who looks like them, sings in a language they speak, and represents a culture that has long been ignored is being celebrated on the country’s biggest stage. That contrast is telling. America’s anger is reflexive, but the joy is real. It just goes to show that representation matters, that visibility matters, and that the stage doesn’t need to conform to one narrow idea of who counts as “American enough.”

Watching this unfold, though, has really made me think about the country we live in. Why does whiteness still define who gets celebrated at moments of national prominence? Why is it so easy for people to say, unironically, that a Latinx artist isn’t “American”? (Let’s not forget Puerto Rico is… part of America.) And why does this reaction happen automatically, even when the person being criticized is wildly successful, universally talented, and beloved by millions? On a broader scale, this anger is not really about Bad Bunny, but about the discomfort of seeing someone outside the majority occupying a space they’ve historically monopolized.

When Bad Bunny hits the Super Bowl stage, yes, he’ll be dropping bangers and I can’t wait– but he will also be forcing our country to confront its own narrowness and its assumptions about who deserves visibility.  For once, America’s cultural hierarchy is being challenged in front of millions. And if that makes some people uncomfortable, maybe that discomfort is exactly the point.