News/Commentary

‘Hey NFL, the United States only has one National Anthem’

February 11, 2024 | | Print Article

Outrage is brewing over the NFL’s decision to play what many refer to as “the black national anthem” at the start of this year’s Super Bowl game.

Called “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” the song was originally written as a poem in 1899 by James Weldon Johnson, then the NAACP’s executive for 10 years, according to Today.

“The poem became a song when Johnson’s brother John Rosamond Johnson composed an instrumental arrangement for it. The song was first performed in 1900 during a celebration of former president Abraham Lincoln. It was sung by a choir of 500 children at their segregated school in Florida,” Today notes.

In times past, the song “became a rallying cry against the realities of lynching, segregation and discrimination,” but these days, it’s mostly viewed as divisive and unnecessary given that lynching, segregation and discrimination are mostly gone, save for on the “woke” left.

The NFL first committed itself to playing the song before season openers after the violent, deadly Black Lives Matter riots of 2020.

“It has been sung as a part of the pregame show since then,” Today notes.

But critics say it has no place in sports, let alone the Super Bowl, because it’s a song solely for black people — not ALL AMERICANS.

Indeed, a song already exists for ALL AMERICANS, and that song is called “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

The irony is that Democrats predictably think playing the black national anthem will somehow unify the country.

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“To make ‘Lift Every Voice and Sing’ a national hymn, would be an act of bringing the country together. The gesture itself would be an act of healing. Everybody can identify with that song,” Rep. James Clyburn tweeted in 2021:

Yet since then, race relations have only further plummeted.

“According to a survey conducted in 2023, 57 percent of Americans said that they thought that the relations between racial groups in the United States are getting worse in the last five years while 23 percent said that the relations between racial groups have stayed the same,” Statistica notes.

Proponents of the black national anthem aren’t helping their case by being so nasty on the social media platform X toward anybody — especially white people — who disagree with them.

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Case in point (*Language warning):

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Notice how one critic accused opponents of being motivated by white supremacy. Yet the critic is the one who wants a national event for all Americans — white, black, brown, etc. — to be centered around solely black people …

One critic summed up the illogic of playing the national black anthem at the Super Bowl quite well.

“[W]hat if white people said we want our own national anthem. [W]e’ll call it the white national anthem. [Y]ou don’t think they’d call us white supremacy. [W]hat about black supremacy? [A]ren’t we all one nation under God? [T]hat’s what the national anthem represents,” they wrote.

Look:

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Vivek Saxena
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