At the Super Bowl, Bad Bunny’s Defiant Joy Beat Trump’s Knockoff Eugenics

When Bad Bunny took the Super Bowl halftime stage, he performed one of the most beautiful examples of refusal I have witnessed in a long time.

In a moment when Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents are conducting mass raids in American cities designed as a spectacle for social media, when families are being torn apart and warehoused in cages in hastily constructed concentration camps, when President DonaldTrump calls Somali immigrants “garbage,” Bad Bunny showed up as the embodiment of flourishing. Vibrant. Alive. Unapologetically present, resulting in the most watched Super Bowl halftime in history.

And that presence, those enormous ratings, and that contagious joy was too much for some white supremacists to bear. I do not recommend you waste your time on Trump’s knockoff social media to understand his eugenic ideology. You know what he wrote without looking, and Fox News will parrot it for him anyways.

As a psychologist who studies the roots of my discipline in eugenics, I recognized immediately what made this performance so threatening, so necessary, so brilliant. While Bad Bunny...