Journalist Unfamiliar with Adjectives

The 2024-2025 NFL season kicked off on Thursday night with a home game of the Kansas City Swifties against the Baltimore Ravens. At each opening game the past eight seasons, Lift Every Voice and Sing," dubbed the "Black National Anthem," has been sung, as has the Star-Spangled Banner. This fellow is not amused:

Why has the NFL replaced our National Anthem with the so-called “BLACK” national anthem?!

We have ONE national anthem, and it’s the Star Spangled Banner.

Does the NFL want to be Bud Lighted or something?
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— Nick Sortor (@nicksortor) September 6, 2024

Respectively, he's wrong, he's right, and it ain't going to happen.  The Black National Anthem has been played on many occasions before NFL games since the social unrest of 2020 and the National Anthem is played before each game. Moreover, the NFL is not going to be boycotted.  Television contracts already are in place and even in the unlikely event that viewership suffers, sales of merchandise ("merch") for individual teams and players will continue to soar.

However, we do have only one National Anthem, the Star-Spangled Banner. It's not as good a composition as is "Lift Every Voice and Sing" but it is the national anthem. If there were more than one national anthem, there would be no national anthem.

This is a difficult concept for so many people, perhaps especially educated people. Thus.....

Does the Star Spangled Banner apply to only white Americans? Or does it apply only to white and brown Americans and not black Americans? A former sports personality, now a contributor at The Atlantic, believes the answer to the latter question is "yes."

So every year we just have to go through this thing where some white people get ridiculously angry upon discovering 1) that a Black national anthem exists 2) that the NFL has been playing it for years at the start of the season.

— Jemele Hill (@jemelehill) September 6, 2024

Were this song even an anthem for a people, it would be an African-American anthem or a West Indies anthem or Caribbean anthem or, theoretically, an Asian-American or European-American anthem.  "National" refers to- modifies- "nation." 

There is only one national anthem in the USA, as in other nations. And, yes, we will "just have to go through this thing" every year until Hill and others overcome their racial nationalism. The National Anthem does not apply to whites, blacks. Latinos, Asian-Americans, Pacific Islanders or tribal matters. It belongs to all of us.

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