Some individuals suspect that Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” camp is barely a step away from “Make America White Again.”
They discovered quite a lot of meals for that thought within the MAGA world’s response to this 12 months’s Super Bowl pregame present.
The present included Sheryl Lee Ralph of “Abbott Elementary” singing James Weldon Johnson’s 123-year-old hymn “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” incessantly referred to as the “Black national anthem.” It’s a galvanizing music for the civil rights motion — and nearly each different church or faculty the place African Americans congregate.
Country music star Chris Stapleton superbly carried out “The Star-Spangled Banner,” the nation’s official anthem. Yet, that wasn’t sufficient for the predictable gaggle of MAGA detractors who apparently noticed some form of low-octane race battle.
Rep. Lauren Boebert, a Colorado Republican, tweeted, “America only has ONE NATIONAL ANTHEM. Why is the NFL trying to divide us by playing multiple!? Do football, not wokeness.”
Similarly, I used to be in uncommon settlement with Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene when she tweeted “Chris Stapleton just sang the most beautiful national anthem at the Super Bowl.” But not when she added, “we could have gone without the rest of the wokeness.”
Really? I’m considerably amused by the MAGA proper’s embrace of “woke” as an insult phrase for liberals. Would they only as quickly stay asleep? Dream on.
“There is only ONE National Anthem in the United States of America,” tweeted rising 20-year-old Black conservative commentator-activist CJ Pearson. “The National Anthem is for EVERY American. What’s the purpose of a black one? Super Bowl Sunday should UNITE America, not divide it by race. It’s not the 1960s.”
Well, the aim of “the black one” has one thing to do with the worth of realizing and understanding American historical past, however that’s a subject that sadly has grow to be trendy for some conservatives to disregard.
The official marketing campaign Twitter account for Arizona’s defeated Republican nominee for governor, Kari Lake, tell us that “Our girl is against the idea of a ‘black National Anthem’ for the same reason she’s against a “white National Anthem. She subscribes to the idea of “one Nation, under God.”
Fine. I, too, imagine in “one nation under God,” however we don’t get there by fanning the flames of worry and paranoia purely for political exploitation.
But let’s make clear this a lot: As a lot because the music is commonly referred to as the “Black national anthem,” as I, too, have carried out once in a while, the Super Bowl announcers fairly correctly referred to it by its formal title, “Lift Every Voice and Sing.”
That means each voice.
The music doesn’t even point out race. It doesn’t must. Written in 1900 as a poem by Johnson, a onetime NAACP chief, it was set to music by his brother John Rosamond Johnson, based on NAACP historians:
Lift each voice and sing
Till earth and heaven ring
Ring with the harmonies of liberty;
Let our rejoicing rise
High because the listening skies
Let it resound loud because the rolling sea.
Sing a music filled with the religion that the darkish previous has taught us
Sing a music filled with the hope that the current has introduced us;
Facing the rising solar of our new day begun
Let us march on until victory is gained.
There’s extra, however these opening verses are most frequently sung at church buildings, colleges and different public gatherings in my lifelong African American expertise.
I’ve all the time sung it and heard it the best way my schoolteacher grandmother taught it, not simply as a automobile for us to sing the blues about our struggling and victimization as a individuals, however as a rallying cry to our resilience and willpower.
Yet the MAGA tradition warriors insist on making a easy gesture of outreach sound like one thing sinister, threatening and even racist. Like the opposite tradition battle battlefronts over accomplice statues and the instructing of Black historical past to our kids, the “Black national anthem” dust-up is a contest for energy.
Worse, it’s used to stir up cultural xenophobia, as if interracial relations must be a zero-sum recreation, during which no race can advance itself with out another race dropping.
Instead, of us, let’s raise each voice — till victory is gained.
Twitter @cptime
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Source: www.bostonherald.com