National anthem is inseparable from politics

We are, again, forced to contemplate the meaning of the First Amendment and the national anthem with regard to sports, and those who play them.

The decision last week by NFL owners (owners? Doesn’t anyone see the complexity of using that terminology alone?) to require players on NFL teams to stand during the playing of the national anthem re-ignited the debate on what to do about players who kneeled or made other expressions during the playing of the song to protest police brutality against people of color and other injustices.

The NFL said that players who didn’t want to stand during the anthem were free to remain in their teams’ respective locker rooms while the song was played. But kneeling or other gestures would subject both players and their teams to a fine. According to the league’s language in announcing the policy, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell “will impose appropriate discipline on league personnel who do not stand and show respect for the flag and the Anthem.”

In doing so, the NFL again conflated the issue. The original protest by then-49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick, in which he sat during the playing of the anthem before an exhibition game in 2016, had nothing to do with the anthem, as he has made abundantly clear since.

“I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color,” Kaepernick told the NFL Network’s Steve Wyche after that game. “To me, this is bigger than football and it would be selfish on my part to look the other way. There are bodies in the street and people getting paid leave and getting away with murder.”

Two days later, Kaepernick told reporters, “ultimately, it’s to bring awareness and make people realize what’s really going on in this country. There are a lot of things that are going on that are unjust (that) people aren’t being held accountable for, and that’s something that needs to change. That’s something that … you know, this country stands for freedom, liberty, justice for all. And it’s not happening for all right now … I’m going to continue to sit. I’m going to continue to stand with the people that are being oppressed.”

Again, Kaepernick was clear.

“There’s a lot of things that need to change,” he said. “One, specifically, is police brutality. There’s people being murdered unjustly, and (police) not being held accountable. Cops are getting paid leave for killing people. That’s not right. That’s not right by anyone’s standards.”

Later, Kaepernick started kneeling while the anthem was played — an idea suggested by U.S. Army veteran and former NFL player, Nate Boyer. And when he was specifically asked about the flag and the military in the context of his protest, Kaepernick said: “I have great respect for men and women who have fought for this country. I have family, I have friends who have gone and fought for this country. And they fight for freedom. They fight for freedom; they fight for the people and for liberty and justice, for everyone. And that’s not happening. I mean, people are dying in vain because this country isn’t holding their end of the bargain up, as far as, you know, giving freedom and liberty and justice to everybody. It’s something that’s not happening. I’ve seen videos, I’ve seen circumstances where men and women that have been in the military have come back and have been treated unjustly by the country they fought for, and have been murdered by the country they fought for. On our land. That’s not right.”

Of course, in contrast, the NBA has already had, and continues to enforce, a longstanding rule requiring players to stand during the playing of the anthem. And, this season, every player has stood — though many have done so while interlocking arms with their teammates. But, there have been no player protests in the NBA.

Some have criticized the NBA and its players for not engaging the issue as so many NFL players did last season, and point out that the careers of former players Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf and Craig Hodges — Abdul-Rauf refused to stand for the anthem while playing for the Nuggets; Hodges was extremely critical of American involvement in the first Gulf War — were shortened in much the way that Kaepernick’s seems to have been, by every team simply refusing to sign them to contracts. Yet the more recent history of both the league and its players has been one in which players, team officials and league officials speak up on the issues of the day without repercussions.

“I think it’s just typical of the NFL,” Warriors Coach Steve Kerr said last Thursday, before Game 5 of the Western Conference finals in Houston.

Steve Kerr on the new NFL national anthem policy: “I think it’s just typical of the NFL… It’s idiotic" (via @MarkG_Medina) pic.twitter.com/LQ9mS4zVQv

— Bleacher Report (@BleacherReport) May 24, 2018

“They’re just playing to their fan base, and they’re just, you know, basically trying to use the anthem as fake patriotism, nationalism, scaring people,” he continued. “It’s idiotic, but that’s how the NFL has handled their business. I’m proud to be in a league that understands patriotism in America is about free speech and about peacefully protesting. I think our leadership in the NBA understands that when the NFL players were kneeling, they were kneeling to protest police brutality, to protest racial inequality. They weren’t disrespecting the flag or the military, But our president decided to make it about that. The NFL followed suit, pandered to their fan base, created this hysteria. It’s kind of what’s wrong with our country right now; people in high places are trying to divide us, divide loyalties, make this about the flag, as if the flag is something other than what it really it. It’s a representation of what we’re about, which is diversity, peaceful protests, the ability, the right to free speech. It’s really ironic, actually, what the NFL is doing.”

A day later, the Milwaukee Bucks issued a very strong statement, on the team’s official stationary and sent out on its website, condemning police brutality in all forms after video of Bucks guard Sterling Brown, who was tasered by Milwaukee police in January while being questioned in a Walgreen’s parking lot, was released. Brown is suing the Milwaukee police, whose chief has already apologized for his officers’ actions.

The Bucks’ statement was ultimately approved by the team’s ownership group led by Wes Edens, Marc Lasry and Jamie Dinan, along with team president Peter Feigin.

“Unfortunately, this isn’t an isolated case,” the team said in its statement. “It shouldn’t require an incident involving a professional athlete to draw attention to the fact that vulnerable people in our communities have experienced similar, and even worse, treatment.

“We are grateful for the service of many good police officers that courageously protect us, our fans and our city, but racial biases and abuses of power must not be ignored.

“There needs to be more accountability.”

The statement falls in line with other recent gestures of support for marginalized and oppressed people. There were the “I Can’t Breathe” warmup shirts worn by LeBron James and other stars before games in 2014 in support of the late Eric Garner, who spoke those words as he was being choked by New York police arresting him for selling cigarettes earlier that year. Garner died after being put in a headlock by a police officer for 15 to 19 seconds and then pushed face down into the sidewalk; the medical examiner’s report listed the cause of death as compression of neck, compression of chest and prone positioning during physical restraint by police,” and ruled the death a homicide. However, a grand jury declined to indict the officers involved.

Minnesota Lynx players and others in the WNBA wore “Black Lives Matter” warmup shirts in 2016, and players in New York, Indiana and Washington refused to answer reporters’ questions after games unless they related to BLM or other social justice issues.

There was the opening segment of the ESPYs in 2016, after the police shootings the week before of Philando Castile in Minnesota and Alton Sterling in Louisiana, in which James, Chris Paul, Dwyane Wade and Carmelo Anthony decried both police shootings and the murder of people of color by people of color in Chicago and other cities.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v

A pause here. You understand that there are people of good will who don’t want to abridge anyone else’s rights, but just want to forget their lives for a couple of hours by watching the best athletes in the world do whatever it is they’re doing that day — catching a football, throwing a baseball, crossing over a defender with a basketball, blasting a slapshot from the dot. And I get that.

But the very notion of playing the national anthem and standing while it plays is a political act. The anthem, a poem written by the attorney Francis Scott Key as he witnessed the attack on Fort McHenry just outside of Baltimore in 1814 as he tried to arrange for the release of a physician being held by the British, is most certainly a paean to the triumph of the U.S. forces defending the Fort. Standing and singing the anthem is, at the least, supporting that. And it’s okay to do so. But it is, nonetheless, political.

“The song itself was a call to arms, ad it has a very political message to it, which is why a lot of people have objected to it over the years,” says Dr. Christopher Olsen, the Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Indiana State University. “It is an odd national anthem, because it is so particularly focused.”

Key wrote four stanzas in his poem. We only sing the first (“…and the rockets’ red glare,” etc.); few people probably know there are three more stanzas. (This is how the whole song probably was meant to be sung — the original Key poem was, almost from the beginning, connected to the British drinking song “To Anacreon in Heaven.” But at more than five minutes in length, the whole poem/song would cut into the first quarter!)

For brevity’s sake, let’s not argue about the second stanza — a reference to the British seeing the still waving American flag from their shores — or the fourth, a paean to “freemen” who stand “Between their lov’d home and the war’s desolation!,” and to “the power that hath made and preserv’d us a nation!” Fairly boilerplate, patriotic stuff — neither of which, also, are almost ever sung.

It’s the third, also almost never sung, stanza that catches your eye — if your eyes are ones that are interested in catching such things:

And where is that band who so vauntingly swore,

That the havoc of war and the battle’s confusion

A home and a Country should leave us no more?

Their blood has wash’d out their foul footstep’s pollution.

No refuge could save the hireling and slave

From the terror of flight or the gloom of the grave,

And the star-spangled banner in triumph doth wave

O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave.

Understanding the meaning of the stanza requires some background.

During the War of 1812, some slaves who escaped their masters in the United States opted to fight for the British in exchange for their freedom after the war. Those slaves formed what was called the British Corps of Colonial Marines.

The British Navy Admiral George Cockburn, motivated perhaps both by belief and pragmatism, helped rescue more than 6,000 slaves; after the war, the British honored their promise, resettling more than 700 former U.S. slaves on the island of Trinidad. It was a practice that the British had begun during the Revolutionary War with Dunmore’s Proclamation, issued by John Murray, the fourth Earl of Dunmore, in 1775, promising freedom for slaves who left any owner fighting against the crown and joined the British to fight for them. One estimate is that 20,000 former slaves wound up fighting for the British during the Revolutionary War, while just 5,000 fought in the Continental Army.

The Colonial Marines were among the British forces that bombed Fort McHenry. Also among the British forces were mercenaries, soldiers paid by the British to fight on their side. Those are the “hirelings” to which Key refers in the third stanza, along with the “slave” that fought as a member of the Colonial Marines.

There is significant difference of opinion, as you might expect, about what Key was getting at in the third stanza.

Some historians have a benign interpretation, saying Key’s antipathy to the “hireling and slave” was not racist but an expression of his anger at their fighting for the other side in the War. Others, though, citing Key’s reference to the British forces as a “band” rather than an Army, believe the third stanza to be a racist insult.

Olsen believes Key wrote the poem while he was both in “fear for his life and unbelievably angry.”

Dunmore’s Proclamation and the resulting flood of ex-slaves to fight against the Americans could have well been in Key’s mind. Very fresh in his mind, without a doubt, was the Haitian Revolution, the 13-year struggle for freedom on the part of people of color on that island, culminating in its independence from French rule in 1804. That victory would have been eye-opening to Americans seeing ex-slaves throw out their former masters.

“Whites were incensed that the British would incite slave rebellion, in their mind, by offering freedom,” Olsen said. “The Patriots, to use the language of today, played the race card. They offered free land for people who killed Indians. They knew the history of the British appealing to slaves, and they were terrified by it. And between the Revolution and this, there was the Haitian Rebellion. The specter of that, those things were terrifying. My gut reading was (Key) was taking pleasure and really expressing his visceral hatred and fear at the same time of the what the British were trying to do.”

Key’s, and by extension, the anthem’s, place in American history is, as with almost everything else during that time, extremely complicated and contradictory. Key owned slaves, but freed many of them during his life. He represented individual people of color in various cases in which they sought their freedom, yet his views on slaves as a whole seem quite clear: he viewed African slaves as “a distinct and inferior race of people, which all experience proves to be the greatest evil that afflicts a community.”.

He prosecuted abolitionists, and represented slave owners in court seeking return of their “property” — human beings in bondage. Yet he also represented hundreds of slaves above the Spanish slave ship Antelope that was captured off the coast of what was then Spanish Florida in 1820; Key argued for their release and return to Africa. But this seemingly schizophrenic positioning on race was not an outlier in Key’s time.

“To me, Key is not that unusual, in the sense that he was very much like a lot of wealthy, especially border state, white southerners,” Olsen said. “People have argued the complexity of him because he opposed the slave trade. Sometimes it was humanitarian, but most of the time it was economic. They were selling slaves south and west, and they didn’t want cheaper slaves coming in from Africa … today, the trade, to us, seems like part of the story. At the time, people saw it as very different, and almost unrelated. They didn’t see the trade as part of slavery. They felt like people should be glad being in the U.S. however they got here … it was relatively easy for whites like Key who weren’t involved in the daily violence and torture of slavery to take the moral high ground.”

Didn’t mean to go all history professor tweed jacket on y’all. I’m just trying to make a point. The anthem itself is political. So was the man who wrote it. To tell NFL players and NBA coaches and NBA owners to shut up, stop speaking out/making gestures and stick to sports seems to indicate the preference for only one side of a discussion and debate to be heard. And if an NBA player kneels during the playing of the anthem next season, one hopes their voice and arguments will be heard rather than shoved into the quiet safe space of a locker room where no one else can hear them.

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Longtime NBA reporter, columnist and Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Famer David Aldridge is an analyst for TNT. You can e-mail him here, find his archive here and follow him on Twitter.

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