I would remove that tag and instead add something like
Code:
sup a {
color: inherit;
}
to the CSS stylesheet. That rule sets the link's color to whatever <sup> is using, and <sup> more than likely hasn't got a color set at all, in turn inheriting its color from <p> (or others). It kind of daisychains the color selection all the way back, a < sup < p.
This is preferable to setting any text to black, which can cause problems in certain color modes. But it will still display as black whenever the parent text also displays black, which is presumably the goal here.
Note that the markup you've shared is pretty messy, and there's a chance of weird inheritance / specificity issues in cases like that, which can interfere with your attempts at styling overrides.