(Official Washington Examiner editorial, Feb. 11) The NFL will continue trying to disunite America by featuring two separate “anthems” to begin the Super Bowl. Our country has only one national anthem, which speaks for all its citizens. To suggest otherwise is anathema.
As also happened last year, fans will be asked to stand at attention not just for “The Star-Spangled Banner” but also for “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” long known colloquially as the “black national anthem.”
It’s a lovely song, a paean to liberty, and a worthy expression of black people’s historical struggle to overcome unspeakable mistreatment. Its final sentiments, despite the “gloomy past,” are admirably patriotic: “May we forever stand/ True to our God/ True to our native land.” This being so, it is important to explain why it is a bad idea that it be sung alongside the national anthem.
The affront lies not in the message within the song but in the message sent by when and how the song is to be presented. By pairing it with the national anthem and expecting attendees to stand at attention, the NFL signals that “The Star-Spangled Banner” does not speak for everyone. Rather than respecting a single unifying anthem, the league presents two, one for white people and one for black people, as if the latter were not included in the meaning and grandeur of the first.
This is part of the political Left’s radical racial agenda of national division. Identity politics define people by racial or sexual group membership while immutably characterizing each group and each person within it as either victim or victimizer. Rather than one history in which modern sensibilities demand that black people receive equal recognition, separatism posits that there must be a separate month for black history. Rather than one course of mathematics, the “woke” educrats push a separate black mathematics. The separate black anthem is a musical endorsement of the forces and agenda that are driving deep fissures into our culture and threatening our society…. [The full editorial is at this link.]
