Flags, Flesh, and Freedom: Performing Black Resistance in America's Spectacles

Abstract: The article examines Kendrick Lamar's 2025 Super Bowl LIX halftime performance as a cultural intervention that uses cultural symbolism, choreography, and collaboration to critique systemic racism and reclaim Black agency on a global stage. The article situates the performance within a lineage of Black protest music and visual art using close readings of choreography, costume and flag imagery, vocal arrangement, and cameo appearances (Douglas 2015; Combs 2020; Hammons 1990; Martiel 2017). I argue that the show stages a set of coordinated visual and embodied practices that transform the flag from an emblem of unexamined unity into a contested archive of racial labor and sacrifice. The presentation foregrounds wounded and resistant bodies, deploys the stadium as a pedagogical space, and recenters Black feminine labor through a voice-centered offering of SZA that resists industry norms of hypersexualization (Gómez 2023; Gross 2024). Serena Williams's dance further extends this reclamation by linking athletic performance to cultural sovereignty (Collins 2023). The performance, therefore, operates simultaneously as testimony, aesthetic protest, and public pedagogy, demonstrating that mass broadcast spectacle can function as an archival and didactic medium for racial critique. The article finds that the performance functions as testimony, protest, and pedagogy, transforming national symbols and mass spectacle into vehicles for cultural resistance, memory, and collective empowerment.