Super Bowl Sunday brought the left’s favorite musical challenge to the forefront again; their false claim that the “Star-Spangled Banner” is “racist.” The claim is coupled with their equally false claim that “Lift Every Voice and Sing” is a “black national anthem.”
Firstly, let’s get this straight: there is nothing whatever wrong with the song “Life Every Voice and Sing.” It is a perfectly nice gospel song. What is wrong with the song is that the anti-American, white-hating leftists call it “the black national anthem.”
There is no such thing as “the black national anthem.”
Calling something “the black national anthem” is purposefully divisive, racist, and anti-American. It is meant to divide blacks away from the United States and to tell that they do not belong here. It is a lie. They most certainly do belong here. Blacks are an important and integral part of the U.S. now and throughout history.
So, now that we have dispensed with the lie that there is any such thing as a “black national anthem,” let’s debunk — once again — the lie that the actual national anthem is “racist.”
The first thing we have to address is the nonsense that the “Star-Spangled Banner” can’t be an anthem for blacks merely because it was written before the 1964 Civil Rights act. The lie goes that the song can’t represent them merely because it was written when blacks were enslaved.
So, let’s knock that down. Firstly, not all blacks were enslaved. But that is a minor point. The real point is that it does not matter that slavery was legal when the song was written, nor that it was legal when the country was founded to determine representation. That is because the U.S. system was invented to make internal changes to reflect the will of the people and had the lofty goal of representing all the people who live here in this country.
And guess what? That system WAS used to end slavery, and ensure civil rights.
But if we use the silly notion that the U.S. was “not made for blacks” as a barrier to representation or belonging, then it wasn’t made for me, either. That is because only rich business and landowners were allowed to vote when the country was first cobbled together. And I am no rich man! Should I assume this country was “never meant for me” because of that? I would be stupid if I felt that way. And it is stupid to say this country was not created for women, blacks, and other minorities.
So, let’s get to the actual history of “The Star-Spangled Banner.”
The calumny against our country spewed by the historically illiterate left that our national anthem is “racist” is a charge that further proves that liberals are disingenuous, hysterics who only parrot the garbage they hear from others even as they don’t take any time to research the matter themselves.
A few years ago, this nonsense was being peddled by the California chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) which not only passed a “resolution” that the national anthem is “racist,” but announced that it wants to pursue congressional sponsors to rescind the status of “The Star-Spangled Banner” as our national song.
Why were they doing this? What else but raaaaacism?
Firstly, the move was an effort by the California NAACP to pass a resolution in support of anti-American protester and former NFL player Colin Kaepernick, according to the Sacramento Bee.
“We owe a lot of it to Kaepernick,” California NAACP President Alice Huffman during the group’s state meeting at the time. “I think all this controversy about the knee will go away once the song is removed.”
Along with the resolution to celebrate Kaepernick’s hate mongering, the group also charged that “The Star-Spangled Banner” is “one of the most racist, pro-slavery, anti-black songs in the American lexicon.”
This was 2017 when Kaepernick was still in the news and not the full-blown has been he is now. But the discussion thrust the anthem issue back into the light. And it has been a way to agitate the races ever since, one exacerbated by the NFL which has kept the attack on the national anthem alive by playing the false “black national anthem.”
One can think what one wants about Colin Kaepernick. A patriotic American would find him to be full of hate and lies, but if you appreciate his lies, well, you’ll love him. Of course, since this is America, you can hate the national anthem all you want, as well. But claiming it is “racist” and “pro-slavery” is simply a lie. Proclaiming junk as fact isn’t just historical revisionism, it is outright falsification.
So, let’s look at that maligned “third verse” that the left points to in order to prove that “The Star-Spangled Banner” is “racist.” It reads in part:
Their blood has wash’d out their foul footstep’s pollution.
No refuge could save the hireling and slave
From the terror of flight or the gloom of the grave
If one is misinformed, purposefully ignorant, or gratingly stupid, one could say the word “slave” up there in that verse “celebrates” the practice of slavery in America.
Only it doesn’t. In fact, it never had anything to do with chattel slavery. It had no connection with keeping black people enslaved in the U.S.A.
The claim that this third verse celebrates the system of slavery, once called America’s “peculiar institution,” has been ridiculed by historians who point out that the words actually referred to the British Navy’s practice of kidnapping American sailors (called impressment) and forcing them to serve in the British Navy. This practice turned Americans into slaves to the British Crown. It was one of the main causes of the War of 1812 and it was the War of 1812 that inspired Francis Scott Key to write the song that would become our anthem over 100 years later.
The idea that the verse celebrated chattel slavery is so absurd, even left-wing Snopes.com said that the claims don’t add up.
But even if there was doubt about that annoying third verse, it doesn’t matter because the lines had not been considered part of the song for more than 60 years before the song was even chosen as our anthem.
That third verse had been dropped in popular treatments of the tune before the Civil War in 1860, and that was long before “The Star-Spangled Banner” was chosen as our anthem in 1931. When it was crowned as our national song, that verse had been nearly forgotten by everyone.
Finally, there isn’t a single historical quote to show that when the song became the national anthem, white Americans considered it to be a powerful commentary on the virtues of slavery or racism. If the song is so entirely racist, it would seem logical that someone, somewhere in the U.S. in the 1930s — an era totally saturated with racism — that the song would have been celebrated as an anthem for segregation and oppression.
But it wasn’t.
So, let’s stop with all this stupidity, shall we?
Follow Warner Todd Huston on Facebook at: facebook.com/Warner.Todd.Huston, or Truth Social @WarnerToddHuston
