Yahoo "News:" Yes, It's Now Time to Cancel the Star Spangled Banner

Are you sure this is about George Floyd and the ten non-gun-armed black people killed by cops in all of 2019?

Because it seems like you're just being more honest about longheld hatreds of America, American institutions, American culture, and Americans, period, and using George Floyd as a Flag of Convenience.

In an increasingly anti-racist era when problematic iconography --ranging from Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben to even the Dukes of Hazzard General Lee car and country band Lady Antebellum's name -- is being reassessed, revised or retired, America's national anthem, "The Star-Spangled Banner," seems to be striking a wrong note.

Last week, protesters in San Francisco toppled a statue of the song's composer, Francis Scott Key, a known slaveholder who once said that African Americans were "a distinct and inferior race of people, which all experience proves to be the greatest evil that afflicts a community." This week, Liana Morales, an Afro-Latinx student at New York’s Urban Assembly School for the Performing Arts, refused to sing "The Star-Spangled Banner" at her virtual graduation ceremony, explaining to the Wall Street Journal, "With everything that’s happening, if I stand there and sing it, I'm being complicit to a system that has oppressed people of color." Instead, Morales performed "Lift Every Voice and Sing," a hymn widely considered to be the "Black national anthem."

posted by Ace at 07:25 PM

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