-By Warner Todd Huston
The latest calumny against our country spewed by the historically illiterate left that our national anthem, “The Star Spangled Banner,” is “racist.” It is a charge that further proves that liberals are disingenuous, hysterics that only parrot the garbage that they hear from others even as they don’t take any time to research the matter themselves.
This time the nonsense is being peddled by the California chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People which has not only passed a “resolution” that the national anthem is “racist,” but has announced that it wants to pursue congressional sponsors to rescind the status of “The Star Spangled Banner” as our national theme song.
Why are 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 this week. “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.”
One can think what he 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, too. But claiming it is “racist” and “pro-slavery” is simply a lie. Proclaiming junk as fact isn’t just historical revisionism, it is outright lying.
So, let’s look at that “third verse” that the left points to 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” slavery.
Only it doesn’t. In fact, it never had anything to do with chattel slavery.
The claim that this third verse celebrates the system of slavery as practiced during America’s “peculiar institution” has been ridiculed by historians who say that the words actually referred the British Navy’s practice of the kidnapping of 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 chosen as our anthem.
That third verse had been dropped in popular treatments of the tune before the Civil War in 1860, long before “The Star Spangled Banner” was chosen as our anthem in 1931. When it was crowned our national song, that verse was nearly unknown by anyone in the country.
Finally, there isn’t a single historical quote to show that when the song became the national anthem Americans considered it a wonderful commentary on the virtues of 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?
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“The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”
–Samuel Johnson
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