The Only Thing More Powerful Than Hate Is Love
Is it though?
The 2026 Super Bowl Halftime show featured an amazing array of American talent on display for the world. Even though it’s safe to say that the overwhelming majority of English speaking Americans did not understand all of Bad Bunny’s lyrics, the show was thoroughly entertaining. Audiences were treated to a musical mix of Salsa and Reggaeton, with hints of Samba and Afro-Cuban Conga influence.
The message was clear: We are all Americans. Love is more powerful than hate. Unity. The cynical realist in me is rolling his eyes.
People love to say “we’re all Americans” as if the sentence itself is a balm for all of our collective woes. It sounds noble. It should be unifying. But if we actually believed in it, the need to continuously repeat it would cease to exist. But we emphasize the point over and over again. The gut wrenching truth of it all is, many Americans only believe in equality in theory. In practice, who counts as “American” still depends on where you’re from, what you look like, who you vote for, who you racially align yourself with, or how loudly you challenge power structure.
Certain Americans (and ya’ll know who you are), love the idea of unity, but not the work of it. “We’re all the same” is a comforting slogan—one that lets us avoid appreciating how differently we actually are and confronting how we use those differences to treat one another. If we truly believed we were all Americans, our laws, our media, our schools, and our justice system would reflect that. They Don’t! And pretending otherwise only protects the lie.
Let’s call it what it is: many people don’t actually believe in the practice of love & unity. They believe in conditional Americanness. You qualify if you ‘look’ right, sound right, vote right, worship right, or stay quiet when injustice shows up. Step outside those boundaries and suddenly the language of unity disappears, replaced with suspicion, hostility, or outright exclusion.
Unity isn’t something we declare. It’s a discipline. It’s something we practice. And until we as Americans practices equality with the same enthusiasm we recite it, “we’re all Americans” will remain a slogan—nothing more.
 | A guest post by
|