As Kansas City fans were enjoying watching the Chiefs defeat the San Francisco 49ers in the Super Bowl, a California professor worried about the deeper meaning of seeing Taylor Swift at the game.
“Why do I feel like it’s slightly racist to be a Taylor Swift fan?” Melina Abdullah posted on X about the Super Bowl.
Abdullah, a co-founder of Los Angeles Black Lives Matter and professor of Pan-African Studies at Cal State University, is listed as cofounder of the Black Lives Matter’s Los Angeles chapter and codirector of the activist wing of the national advocacy organization Black Lives Matter Grassroots, according to the New York Post.
When one user asked her to elaborate on her opinion she replied: “I said FEEL, not think. Kind of like that feeling I get when there are too many American flags.” In the same post, someone commented “Literally everything is racist.” Abdullah responded “Indeed!”
A few hours later, she followed up in another post on X after the Chiefs had won the game: “Why do I feel like this was some right-wing, white-supremacist conspiracy?!?! Booooooo!!!! #SuperBowl.”
Abdullah previously shared controversial opinions on Twitter. “Attention white people… Please don’t ask if you can come to the cookout… #Juneteenth is freedom day for Black folks,” she posted to Twitter in June 2022. “It should be #Reparations day for white folks.”
In December 2021, two days before Jussie Smollet was found guilty of staging a fake hate crime in which he falsely blamed it on white Trump supporters, she argued for his innocence.
“In our commitment to abolition, we can never believe police, especially the Chicago Police Department over Jussie Smollett, a Black man who has been courageously present, visible and vocal in the struggle for Black freedom. While policing at-large is an irredeemable institution, CPD is notorious for its long and deep history of corruption,” she wrote on the Black Lives Matter website.
In 2017, at a conference on intersectionality and discrimination, Abdullah said today’s police officers are the “slave catchers” of yesteryear: “You literally have a target on your back,” she said “That is what policing was founded on and that is what it evolved out of.”
–Alan Goforth | Metro Voice
Taylor Swift photo: Eva Rinaldi Photography www.evarinaldi.com. Wikicommons 2.0.