I don’t speak any Spanish.
Despite the fact that long before I moved to Brooklyn, I lived in the predominantly Puerto Rican and Dominican neighborhood of Inwood, the upper part of Washington Heights in Manhattan.
When my mom was growing up there, it was mostly a German, Irish, and Jewish neighborhood. Her neighbors were the Wagners, O’Malleys, and Rosenbergs. My neighbors were the Garcias, Hernandezes, and Padillas.
Now don’t get me wrong. I learned plenty of Spanish words. At first it was curse words like mierda and culo. Eventually I picked up real ones like agua, amigo, and hermano.
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It felt cool learning words in another language, like my world had gotten a little bigger.
And I was lucky. My whole neighborhood was like that. Our public school classrooms reflected it. My classmates were Black, Filipino, Chinese, Dominican, White. It was an actual melting pot.
That’s where I learned what made America special. My fourth-grade teacher explained that our diversity is what makes this country beautiful.
I believed that then.
I still believe it now.
That’s ME in the bottom row, with my incredibly beautiful, diverse classmates.
But right now, there’s a generation of kids learning something very different. They’re watching intolerant, resentful adults teach them that diversity is something to fear.
I’m talking about the tantrum trump and MAGA threw over Bad Bunny being selected to perform the Super Bowl halftime show.
From the moment it was announced, prominent personalities stomped their feet over how “un-American” he supposedly was.
Bad Bunny is Puerto Rican.
Puerto Rico is America.
It didn’t matter how many people patiently explained this. Maps. History books. Charts. Videos. Nothing worked.
As long as he spoke Spanish and had the nerve to speak English with an accent, he was “other.”
Meanwhile, trump’s ICE goons are literally using appearance and accents to justify detentions, a clear violation of our Fourth Amendment rights.
Facts didn’t matter.
Bad Bunny hosting Saturday Night Live didn’t matter.
Being the second most-streamed artist of all time didn’t matter.
Winning six Grammys didn’t matter.
His acceptance speech didn’t matter, when he said “We’re not savages. We’re not animals. We’re not aliens. We are humans, and we are Americans. Hate gets more powerful with more hate. The only thing more powerful than hate is love.”
MAGA had already decided they’d prove hate was stronger.
Turning Point USA even announced alternative programming for bigots who preferred Kid Rock over Bad Bunny.
Bad Bunny transported America to the Sugarcane fields of Puerto Rico.
And then the show happened.
It was stunning.
Sugarcane fields. Hundreds of dancers dressed as farmers. Barrio scenes with domino games and piragua vendors that took me right back to Washington Heights.
Cardi B. Pedro Pascal. Jessica Alba. Lady Gaga. Ricky Martin.
There was a moment where Bad Bunny handed his Grammy to a little kid who looked just like Liam Ramos, the five-year-old taken by ICE across state lines.
Then Bad Bunny marched through the fields, declared “God Bless America,” and shouted out countries across the Americas as a billboard behind him read “The only thing more powerful than hate is love.”
I couldn’t understand every word.
But my body understood the beat.
The energy.
The joy.
I’ve watched halftime shows for decades. This was electric.
The only thing more powerful than hate is love.
And right on cue, MAGA complained.
They always do.
They complained last year about Kendrick Lamar’s Super Bowl halftime performance too, calling it a “DEI halftime show” and “ghetto,” claiming the lyrics were “gibberish” or hard to understand, despite the performance drawing a record-breaking 133.5 million viewers and featuring Samuel Jackson, SZA, DJ Mustard, and Serena Williams.
A year earlier, they went after Rihanna’s halftime show, with trump himself calling it the “worst halftime show in Super Bowl history,” bizarrely criticizing her language and even her pregnancy reveal, despite their obsessive fixation on forcing women to give birth.
Meanwhile, there is rarely any criticism of white artists unless they openly oppose trump, like Green Day changing their lyrics to “I’m not a part of the MAGA agenda.”
They don’t hate music. They hate being reminded that America doesn’t revolve around them anymore. They hate not being the default.
My Substack last week covered trump’s participation trophy culture, how they resent losing automatic preference.
Bad Bunny didn’t replace anyone.
He expanded the stage.
But MAGA doesn’t see ALSO/AND.
They only see either/or.
And that’s where they’re wrong.
You don’t lose anything when someone else is celebrated.
Bad Bunny doesn’t erase Bruce Springsteen.
Kendrick Lamar doesn’t erase country music.
Representation isn’t subtraction.
It’s expansion.
That’s what I learned growing up.
My world got bigger.
That’s what MAGA can’t stand.
They see culture as a zero-sum game. If someone else is centered, they think they’re being erased.
That’s not patriotism.
That’s insecurity.
And trump feeds it.
He tells them who to hate.
Who to fear.
Who doesn’t belong.
Meanwhile, real problems go untouched. Healthcare. Housing. Wages. Education.
They need distraction. They need division. They need you mad at your neighbor instead of the people picking your pockets.
But I know what America looks like.
America looks like Washington Heights.
It looks like Brooklyn classrooms.
It looks like kids growing up bilingual without thinking twice.
It looks like a Puerto Rican superstar telling the world love beats hate.
America is ALSO/AND.
And MAGA can’t stand it because it exposes how small their worldview is.
They want a country that looks like a mayonnaise sandwich. Uniform. Bland. Safe from change.
But America was never meant to be small.
America is loud, complicated, messy, and beautiful.
It’s dominoes on sidewalks and football on Sundays.
It’s English and Spanish and everything in between.
It’s people coming together.
And no amount of racist tantrums from trump or his followers will ever change that.
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