By Mickey Friedman
October 5, 2016
Remember the black preacher some folks made a fuss about during Barack Obama’s first run for President? Jeremiah Wright, Mr. Obama’s pastor and the man who married him, and baptized his children.
During the campaign, ABC News took a fine tooth comb to Reverend Wright’s sermons and found this about 9/11: “We bombed Hiroshima, we bombed Nagasaki, and we nuked far more than the thousands in New York and the Pentagon, and we never batted an eye … We have supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and black South Africans, and now we are indignant because the stuff we have done overseas is now brought right back to our own front yards. America’s chickens are coming home to roost …”
Reverend Wright went on to explain: “Violence begets violence. Hatred begets hatred. And terrorism begets terrorism. A white ambassador said that, y’all. Not a black militant. Not a reverend who preaches about racism. An ambassador …who is trying to get us to wake up and move away from this dangerous precipice upon which we are now poised. The ambassador said the people that we have wounded don’t have the military capability we have. But they do have individuals who are willing to die and take thousands with them. And we need to come to grips with that.”
But ABC was more interested in the inflammatory. In some ways, even though what he said was reasonable, Reverend Wright was white America’s hyped up worst nightmare. With eyes focused firmly on the White House, Barack Obama severed his connection with the church and repudiated Reverend Wright.
Turns out a black Presidency was more than many whites could bear. Their great collective fear proved fertile ground for the birth certificate nonsense. And enabled the farce that an ambitious black man who wanted to succeed at the all-American game of power and prestige was really a card-carrying socialist anxious to tear it all down.
Again we are fraught with issues of race. So here’s an exercise for white patriots. Flip black and white. Picture black bigots and white slaves. Imagine a white hating, white-bashing black-skinned lawyer who in the early days of the Republic owns six white slaves, including an old woman and a teenaged girl. Slaves who work his Maryland plantation.
Now this black-skinned bigot works as a District Attorney in Washington D.C. And he uses his authority to vigorously prosecute those who oppose white slavery, even shutting down an abolitionist newspaper. Saying this to a black jury: “Are you willing, gentlemen, to abandon your country, to permit it to be taken from you, and occupied by the abolitionist, according to whose taste it is to associate and amalgamate with white people? … [The] abolitionist, who would open upon you the floodgates of such extensive wickedness and mischief?” Wickedness and mischief because they believed obedience to white slavery “is a sin, that we have no more rights over our slaves than they have over us. Does not this bring the Constitution and the laws under which we live into contempt?”
Then he helped convict a free white school teacher who had forged papers for a young white slave couple trying to escape to freedom.
Now imagine this black bigot was the songwriter who wrote the National Anthem.
With this imaginary third verse: “No safe space could save the working honky and the white slave, from the terror of flight or the gloom of the grave. And the star-spangled banner in triumph doth wave O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave.”
You think maybe you wouldn’t be so anxious to put your white hand over your heart to sing his racist song? Maybe you’d imagine white slaves working for peanuts on his “home of the brave” black plantation? Whose land and whose home? Maybe one day you’d even up the courage to stay silent rather than sing this sanctimonious song?
Well it turns out Francis Scott Key was a real life slave-owning, slave-hating American patriot. And the fact that almost none of us knew anything about the man whose song we sing is just one more profoundly sad chapter in our history.
Which brings me all the way around to Colin Kaepernick, the NFL quarterback who took a knee rather than salute the National Anthem while innocent unarmed black people are being killed by police.
So thanks to Colin Kaepernick and his fellow NFL players and Megan Rapinoe and the Garfield, WA HS football team. And I challenge his critics to stand before us and sing a National Anthem that threatens working honkys and white slaves with the gloom of the grave.
Oh, and by the way, during the time Colin Kaepernick made a point about our national anthem, fifteen more black Americans have died at the hands of the police in the home of the free and the land of the brave.
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For more information:
Snopes on ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ and Slavery
http://www.snopes.com/2016/08/29/star-spangled-banner-and-slavery/
“MORE PROOF THE U.S. NATIONAL ANTHEM HAS ALWAYS BEEN TAINTED WITH RACISM”
https://theintercept.com/2016/09/13/more-proof-the-u-s-national-anthem-has-always-been-tainted-with-racism/
Garfield football team takes knee during national anthem prior to game Friday night
http://www.seattletimes.com/sports/high-school/garfield-football-team-takes-knee-prior-to-game-friday-night/
Here’s How Many Black People Have Been Killed By Police Since Colin Kaepernick Began Protesting
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/colin-kaepernick-police-killings_us_57e14414e4b04a1497b69ba6
Star Spangles was first published in the September 29, 2016 issue of the Berkshire Record.
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