Saturday, September 16, 2017

Is ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ Racist?

A statue of Francis Scott Key vandalized in Baltimore

By Walter Olson

Its third verse uses the word ‘slave,’ but it may not have referred to chattel slavery in the South.

By now you’ve probably heard the claim that America’s national anthem, “The Star-Spangled Banner,” is an expression of racial hostility toward African Americans and should be either retired or at least acknowledged as a subject of national embarrassment.

These reports appear to have influenced the act of vandalism in a Baltimore park this week, in which a statue of Francis Scott Key, the Maryland lawyer who wrote the words to the song during the War of 1812, was defaced with red paint and slogans including “Racist Anthem.”

But although claims of this sort have been circulating since at least the 1990s, it would not be fair to say that historians are of one mind on whether Key’s song was understood in its day to be making any reference to race.

Exhibit A in critics’ account is the anthem’s seldom-sung third verse, which gloats at

Read the rest here.

6 comments:

  1. I mean, regardless of whether it's racist, it's become part of a ritual of nationalistic idolatry, which is just as bad.

    I do get a little dismayed when I see conservatives, who frequently complain that black people invariably want more government, lose their minds when black people aren't being sufficiently worshipful of the American state. To me it's tremendously encouraging that so many are realizing that the police aren't necessarily protecting them. Rather than browbeating them for not being good little sheep, this skepticism should be nurtured.

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    1. "I mean, regardless of whether it's racist, it's become part of a ritual of nationalistic idolatry, which is just as bad."

      Indeed.

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  2. All whites are racist Nazis according to the left.

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  3. Racist? I don't think so.

    Lyrically it mostly just a war song. Not something that people should want to have as their anthem. This just helps to perpetuate endless war.

    It is a beautiful piece of music otherwise. Very inspiring. It is the direction of the inspiration that is concerning.

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