Why it might be time to finally replace ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ with a new national anthem

Yahoo ^ | June 24, 2020 | Lyndsey Parker

[C19fan]

In an increasingly antiracist 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.”

[cld51860]

I don’t believe he was in it. It was more about how the band proceeded after Freddie’s passing and got back to touring with Adam Lambert.

[maxwellsmart_agent]

This is just more garbage from Yahoo!

[maxwellsmart_agent]

This is just more garbage from Yahoo!