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San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick made national news when he refused to stand for the National Anthem. However, what most folks do not know is that the anthem is grounded in anti-blackness.
Francis Scott Key, the author of the Star Spangled Banner, was a slaveholding lawyer from Maryland.
“He [Francis Scott Key] supported sending free blacks (not slaves) back to Africa and, with a few exceptions, was about as pro-slavery, anti-black and anti-abolitionist as you could get at the time.”
-Jason Johnson
The Star Spangled banner was originally written as a poem, and the third stanza is filled with racism.
“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.”
Key is literally claiming that the blood of slaves will wash away the pollution of the British soldiers.
Via The Root
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