If you are attending any NFL game in stadiums across the country, you’re going to be standing a little longer than usual for the national anthem. That’s because in addition to “The Star-Spangled Banner,” they are now going to also be playing “Lift Every Voice and Sing”, the Black national anthem. 

While this symbolic gesture may seem genuine on behalf of a league that continues to ostracize Colin Kaepernick, it is only window dressing. Moreover, the playing of this anthem has rankled a few feathers in the so-called liberal community.

On Friday’s edition of HBO’s Real Time, host Bill Maher chided the playing of both anthems, saying that the only time two anthems should be played is when the other team is from Canada.

He was rebuked by Whoopi Goldberg, who supported the singing of the Black national anthem because of racial strife, saying, “because we have gone backwards a good 10, 15 years, we’re having to re-educate people.”

Hollywood posturing aside, this isn’t a new stance.The Black national anthem has been scrutinized since it first emerged. Despite being sung at historically Black colleges and universities and at special events on a regular basis, people fail to recognize that it is as much a part of America as okra and sweet potato pie. There is a call from one section of America for unity and for one anthem to be performed, but what that section of the population really wants to do is diminish the power of the Black voice.

Should there be one anthem? In a perfect world, that would be possible. However, America failed to create a truly united country. For the past century and a half our country has enacted laws that on the surface appear to promote integration, but they fail in their execution. When school systems outlaw “separate but equal,” yet keep Black teachers in substandard situations, we are still two Americas. When there is a pay gap that reinforces the division of wealth primarily on racial lines, we are still two Americas. When school systems punish teachers who want to teach the real history of America, we are still two Americas.

“The Star-Spangled Banner” is composed from the stanzas of a poem titled “Defence of Fort M’Henry” by Francis Scott Key, a slave owner. In fact, the second and third stanzas of Key’s poem allude to slavery in a way that some historians have said glorifies the institution. 

The reason that multiple anthems have to be played is because there continues to be an America that never wanted to recognize its unique diversity. How can there be one anthem in a country that perpetrated the Trail of Tears, the Chinese Exclusion Act, slavery, Jim Crow, and mass incarceration? Multiple anthems must exist because we live in a country that loves to praise diversity for votes yet legislate on anything but. 

What’s even more disturbing is when people such as Clark Atlanta University professor Dr. Timothy Askew tries to incorporate MLK as if it’s some type of commandment that Black people have to follow via groupthink regarding “Lift Every Voice and Sing.” He said, “To sing the ‘Black National Anthem’ suggests that Black people are separatists and want to have their own nation. This means that everything Martin Luther King Jr. believed about being one nation gets thrown out the window.”

It’s downright disrespectful to those ancestors who sung it as a reminder that despite the everyday struggle, there will be light at the end of the tunnel. The song, written by James Weldon Johnson and composed by his brother John Rosemond Johnson, was created at the end of the 19th century as Reconstruction efforts were being dismantled, and the initiation of Jim Crow limited job opportunities. It was purposed to discuss the struggles that Black people were facing at the time and uplift as well.

Bottom line: for a nation that likes to boast of our patriotism, we sure display absurd amounts of ignorance when it comes to realizing that “Lift Every Voice and Sing” is as patriotic as it gets. So until this country’s leadership atones for its sins of slavery and Jim Crow in the past and its sins of systemic racism and mass incarceration in the present, there cannot be just one anthem.