The Patriot Post® · A Divisive Super Bowl

This Sunday, some 115 million of your fellow Americans will tune in to watch a sporting event so big, so spectacular, that advertisers will cough up an average of $7 million just to run a 30-second commercial during its four-hour time slot.

Why, it’s an event so huge that it calls for the singing of twice as many national anthems as normal.

We’re talking about Super Bowl LVIII, of course, in which the AFC’s Kansas City Chiefs will play the NFC’s San Francisco 49ers at Allegiant Stadium in Las Vegas, and viewers around the globe will be treated to stirring renditions not only of our national anthem but, for the third year in a row, the so-called black national anthem.

“Lift Every Voice and Sing” is a uniquely American song, a beautiful spiritual written more than a century ago by author, poet, and civil rights activist James Weldon Johnson. As such, it deserves better than to be made a political football. Because if “Lift Every Voice and Sing” is the black national anthem, does that mean that “The Star-Spangled Banner” is the white national anthem?

What could be more divisive than a segregation of national anthems? What could be more Marxist than an effort to divide our nation, black from white, rather than unite it under a patriotic common purpose?

The NFL’s decision, as Commissioner Roger Goodell and his fellow race-obsessed proponents will tell us, is an appropriate effort to acknowledge the racial balance of the league, which is around 70% black.

As columnist Larry Elder observes: “It appears we’ve come full circle since the 2004 Democratic National Convention when then-Illinois State Senator Barack Obama said: ‘Yet even as we speak, there are those who are preparing to divide us … there’s not a liberal America and a conservative America — there’s the United States of America. There’s not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there’s the United States of America. … We are one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the stars and stripes, all of us defending the United States of America.’”

If only we lived in a country where folks were judged not by the color of their skin but by the … er, never mind.

The NFL is lucky. Its appeal is so strong, and its brand so powerful, that most of its fans will simply shrug off this pathetic racial overreach.

Elder, himself a black man, reminds us that our nation has come a long way. He writes: “There was a time when black quarterbacks were a rarity. White coaches and owners assumed blacks lacked the intelligence, leadership ability and fan base appeal to lead teams as quarterbacks. Black would-be coaches faced the same bigotry and discrimination. Today, the league and the public would not tolerate anti-black racism, and many a career — whether player, coach or broadcaster — has been damaged, if not ended, over racist comments or comments perceived as racist. This is not your grandfather’s America.”

Have we, though? If we’re placating — or are we patronizing? — blacks with their own separate national anthem, have we really come a long way racially?

Another wise columnist, Dennis Prager, says that there are two big lessons here. The first is an effort by the Left “to destroy America as we have known it,” as we also have noted. “Playing two ‘national anthems’ has no other goal than disuniting Americans. … There is a black America and there is the rest of America.”

Prager’s second lesson, though, is the larger one — the one he repeats with regularity: “The Left destroys everything it touches. High schools, elementary schools, universities, journalism, the nuclear family, young Americans’ mental health, male-female relations, religion, our borders, love of country, medicine, and medical schools — the list includes every noble institution and ideal in our country.”

And, yes, including that great American institution known as the Super Bowl.

“E Pluribus Unum is dead,” says Prager in conclusion. “For the Left, another touchdown.”