NAACP's Outrageous Demand

California Assemblywoman Melissa Melendez sent me a note on Facebook yesterday morning that read as follows: “I received this letter today from the NAACP, emailed to each republican legislator. I assume they sent the same to democrat legislators in a separate email. They would like support in abolishing the National Anthem.”

I discussed the letter with a friend of mine who is a part of a local chapter of the NAACP, and he not only confirmed that the letter was true, but was astonished at the support of the move when it was voted on.

The claim by the NAACP is that the National Anthem is racist because of a line in the third verse.

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.

The word slave is the offensive, and racist, word, allegedly.

According to National Review, “At the time Key was writing, the word ‘slave’ (we’ll get to “hireling” in a minute) had long functioned in English as a wide-ranging epithet, hurled at persons of any and all colors, nationalities, and conditions of servitude or otherwise.”

The article at National Review goes on to say:

Shakespeare, who barely mentioned America in his writings, used the word more than 180 times in his works. Fewer than a third of those references are in the plays set in Roman and Greek times, in which characters in the drama might be literal slaves. More often, Shakespeare’s characters — including Macbeth, Lear, and many of the kings in the history plays — use “slave” as an insult. (“O what a rogue and peasant slave am I!” says Hamlet, a prince, as part of a self-lacerating soliloquy.) Though often signifying low birth, these uses have no connection to color or — aside from the frequent use of the epithet to put down the French — to nationality. Still less do they connect to the institution of chattel slavery as found in the Americas. This usage had not disappeared by Key’s lifetime. In Robert Burns’s battle poem “Scots Wha Hae,” written in 1793 though set more than 400 years earlier, the word “slave” is an insult directed at his fellow Scots who would flee rather than follow their king into the Battle of Bannockburn. To Americans, while “slave” was both a common descriptive word and an epithet, “hireling” — especially in contexts of poetry and literature — ordinarily carried derogatory connotations. It meant someone such as a soldier, official, or laborer who served for money rather than from some more durable loyalty such as to family or nation. Yet another Robert Burns song, “Parcel of Rogues,” describes Scotland as having been sold out for “hireling traitor’s wages.” “Hireling and slave” is not an accidental pairing; the two words often occurred together as epithets. Was Key pursuing a grudge by describing, or misdescribing, the Corps of Colonial Marines as slaves? Or did he have the (predominantly white) conscripts in mind? Some soldiers on the British side were involuntary conscripts, and the British crown’s policy of in effect kidnapping young men and sending them into battle had roused indignation, contempt, and disgust on the American side. Was Key pursuing a grudge by describing, or misdescribing, the Corps of Colonial Marines as slaves? Or did he have the (predominantly white) conscripts in mind? Or was he just reaching for a common word pairing, familiar to his listeners, that provided him with a rhyme?

The NAACP also voted that the NFL Teams should be forced to take on Colin Kaepernick as a player (Kaepernick is the former San Francisco quarterback who started this whole “kneeling during the National Anthem” thing).

Is that what American Liberty is about?  Forcing a business to hire someone because of his political stance?

The problem is, this is nothing about the National Anthem, the flag, slavery, or anything else the leftists decide to throw on the pile of burning books they are stacking. The movement is all about Marxism. The strategy is to deconstruct American History, to label our system as oppressive, so that revolutionary change is needed. If there is nothing wrong with the American System, then how would revolutionaries convince anyone there needs to be a change?

While the liberal left loons are claiming we have an oppressive system, however, let’s take a look at a few things. The NFL Players who are lodging a complaint about the oppression of the American System, and the out of control racism in America, are millionaires, and got rich playing a kid’s game. Their complaints follow eight years of the first black president, and a campaign season in 2016 that saw as one of the Republican front-runners a black neurosurgeon named Ben Carson.

What oppression?

Even the statistics say otherwise. . .

► In 1960 only 22% of families in the black community were single-parent households.
Now, that number is about 72%. Daily Signal
► According to the 1938 Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences, in 1938 about 11% of black children were born to unwed mothers. Today about 75% of black children are born to unwed mothers. Walter E. Williams
► In the decades following emancipation, poverty was widespread throughout the black community regardless of the status of the family. Today, about 22% of blacks in total live in poverty. U.S. Poverty Statistics
► Two-parent black families are rarely poor. Only 8% of black married-couple families live in poverty. Among black families in which both the husband and wife work full time, the poverty rate is under 5%. Poverty in black families headed by single women is 37%. As early as 1900, when racism was rampant, the duration of black unemployment was 15 percent shorter than that of whites. Today, in a time were we just finished two terms of the first black President, and experienced the candidacy of a black neurosurgeon named Ben Carson in the last election for the White House, it’s about 30 percent longer. Daily Signal
► In 2016, only 16 unarmed black men all year were killed by police. In 2015 the number was 36. Washington Post 2016, Washington Post, 2015.
► The black population in the United States is roughly 47 million (43 million “black only”), or about 14.5% of the total American population. Lightning strikes about 300 Americans annually. 14.5% of 300 is 43.5, which means if one was to stick strictly to the percentages, about 43 to 44 blacks are possibly struck by lightning each year. Taking into consideration that only 16 unarmed black men all year were killed by police last year, and 36 the prior year, based on the numbers a black is more likely to be struck by lightning than to be killed by a police officer. Black Demographics
► The National Review reports it’s not true that black men are constantly stopped by the police for no reason. Indeed, black men are less likely than white men to have contact with the police in any given year, though this includes situations where the respondent called the cops himself: 17.5 percent versus 20.7 percent. Similarly, a black man has on average only 0.32 contacts with the police in any given year, compared with 0.35 contacts for a white man. It’s true that black men are overrepresented among people who have many contacts with the police, but not by much. Only 1.5 percent of black men have more than three contacts with the police in any given year, whereas 1.2 percent of white men do. Only 0.6 percent of black men experience physical force by the police in any given year, while approximately 0.2 percent of white men do. To be fair, these are probably slight undercounts, because the survey does not allow us to identify people who did not experience physical force during their most recent contact but did experience such force during a previous contact in the same year. Only 0.08 percent of black men are injured by the police each year, approximately the same rate as for white men. A black man is about 44 times as likely to suffer a traffic-related injury, according to the National Hospital Ambulatory Medical Care Survey. Moreover, keep in mind that these tallies of police violence include violence that is legally justified. Data from 2015 suggests that black men are three times as likely to commit violent crimes as white men. To the extent that cops are more likely to use force against people who commit violent crimes, which they surely are, this could easily explain any disparities, even though the differences are very slight.

The facts show us that racism and police brutality is not running rampant throughout the United States as we are being falsely advised by the media and leftist politicians. In fact, based on the poverty numbers as compared to the numbers regarding the family unit, it is apparent that the problem does not lie in the Democrat Party’s false accusation of racism, but in the reality that the family unit has been devastated by some kind of interference that is plaguing the black community more so than other communities.