Black National Anthem

[Dill]

(07-04-2020, 09:13 AM)SunsetBengal Wrote: In the years prior to that dispute and ensuing war, a great many slaves fled their owners and plantations.  Where did those people flee to?  They didn't run to Mexico.  They didn't travel West and claim their own territory to form their own Nation.  They didn't take boats back to Africa, where their own people sold them down river into slavery in the first place.  No, they fled to America, land of the free, home of the brave.  A place where we live as "One Nation, indivisible".

The notion of a "second" National Anthem, one specifically aimed at one people in a great melting pot, is sort of contradictory to the ideals that the Nation is actually principled upon.  Perhaps the general messaging in society shouldn't be "hey, some of you were mean to us", but rather "thanks for seeing us as equals, and making things right"?

Just a quick addition to some of Bpat's points--clearly we weren't living as "one nation, indivisible" during the Civil War. Not Canada, not Mexico, but America, land of the free, was "home of the slaves" in North America until 1865. And then home of racial apartheid for another hundred years.

Texas seceded from Mexico, the destination of some 30% of runaway slaves, precisely because Mexico outlawed slavery. And it was added to the Union in part to increase the number of slave state senators in Congress.

Since the founding there has been an argument about what this nation was "principled upon." The author of our national anthem, Francis Scott Key, was a slave holder and ardent defender of "our peculiar institution" as he called slavery.

Some people (nowdays you'd call them "liberals") began embracing the "melting pot" ideal in the last quarter of the 19th century. It's from that time that political cartoons and illustrations began circulating with an "inclusive" message. They only finally won this battle in the 1960s, or at least succeeded in getting a majority to agree that THAT was the principle upon which the US was founded, part of what made the US "exceptional."

Now people speak as if racial inclusion was always the goal at the Founding. Every step of the way, advocates of civil rights and equality have been "divisive" only because there were people who opposed civil rights and equality. 

The latest round of civil rights protest has arisen because a sufficient number of people agrees that we are in fact not "one nation, indivisible" when it comes to police protection, even if we are in anthems, pledges and patriotic paintings. We need to consider closely why they should be suddenly cast as divisive in current debates, and most visibly by a president sliding downward in the polls.