Oh, Say Can You See: Is the American Anthem “Racist”?
If you were to ask this question to Gwen Berry, and to people of her same cast of mind across racial lines, the answer would be an unflinching, rotund yes. But then, such answer would not necessarily be a bad thing; for that would help you in understanding at a deeper level what such cast of mind is made of, as such answer would make it plain, enabling you to gain access into, and make due assessment of, the idiosyncratic manner in which people belonging to, for instance, different races, fail or succeed in their attempt to make sense to even their own personal and racial reality. Once you have gotten to this point, you can proceed to find explanations as to the origin and formation of such idiosyncrasy----as to how different ways of seeing things and interpreting them relate to race, or rather, to the material and cultural conditions on which people who identify themselves as belonging to a specific race, or any other social categories, live.
The point I am trying to make is----if Gwen Berry believes, as she indeed says she does, that the American Anthem is a racist piece of patriotic paraphernalia that “disrespects” her people, then that should call for a serious set of ethological questions. For example, we could ask: wouldn’t her reading be the expression of a specific idiosyncratic mode of thinking and interpretation always already historically determined by the mere fact that she identifies herself, that is, she instinctively embraces and makes her own the whole range of cultural, ideological, and psychological presuppositions from which derive the norms that control life within her racial community?
That was just an example of questions that are never asked about what I think is justifiable to call Wokism-Leninism, for it is Lenin’s and even Mao’s---- and not necessarily Marx’s---- methods Black idiosyncrasy resembles. Thus, even without maybe ever immersing herself into that kind of reading, Gwen Berry nonetheless manages to interpret passages of the American Anthem in a manner that evokes Leninism, and instinctively adopts toward it an attitude with Leninist strappings. If it could have been possible for her jump in such a way as to be able tear up the lyrics and the music of the Anthem, she would have not just turned around.
But, to ask the question again: Is the American Anthem “Racist”? Let us dig into it. The passage of the Anthem the activated the Athlectivist’s wokism is the third stance or strophe, which runs thus:
“And where is the 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 washed out of their foul footstep’s pollution.
No refuge could save the hireling and slave
From the terror of flight and the gloom of the grave:
And the start-spangled banner in triumph doth wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave.”
Clearly, the first two lines of this strophe make an almost direct reference to one of the many wars this country has liked to get itself into from its very beginning. But this one, which inspired the writing of the Anthem was the American War of 1812, against the British. In a controlled sarcastic tone, the Anthem recalls that during the antebellum phase, there was a “band,” that is, the camp of the British, in alliance with Spain, that was the outright enemy who, in the view of the author of the Anthem, had boasted that going to war with them was going to bring ruin and utter destruction to the United States. The loss of the homestead, and worse, of their country itself was going to be the outcome for those who confronted the referred “band” in the first line. It was during this war that the White House and the Capitol were burned down. We know from historiographical sources that such War was not cleanly won by the United States; but because it never came to worst and the nation was preserved virtually intact, then we can safely infer that the Anthem is praising only of homespun victories here and there, but nonetheless from here we can also infer who the epithet “band” above refers to. Furthermore, that the Royal British Army, arrogant and boastful, is evoked as a “band,” right away demonstrates the dismissiveness of the Anthem toward them, and it is precisely this word on which the sarcastic tone of the strophe rests. Obviously, the Anthem, sung by the victor, is being sarcastically exultant of having overcome the havoc and the confusions brought on the war, from which the United States were able to preserve intact home and country, over a more seasoned enemy in the art of war. (Of course, what the Anthem celebrates is in a way a pyrrhic victory: The United States failed thereof in swallowing Canada, thus expanding the Empire. But that is literally another country.)
Now, since the Athlectivist Gwen Berry claims to know the history of “her people,” then she should have realized that her enslaved ancestors were not the ones who would “vauntingly” have sworn to prevail over the United States, and that slavery was not even the bone of contention in this war. So, where does the Athlectivist conclude that there is disrespect being demonstrated toward “her” people therein? The most obvious explanation for that is that, given her idiosyncratically Black manner of interpretation, she stumbles over the one stumbling line in the strophe, and never recovers, and that leads her to stumble again over the one single word therein which she interprets as a reference to actual slavery, when indeed, it does not.
The stumbling line goes: “Their blood has washed out of their foul footstep’s pollution.” It is a grammatically confusing statement, forced in there by the need of the lyrics to rhyme something with “confusion” in the couplet above, and that in turn makes it “masterful,” in that it creates the poetic effect that word evokes. But that only attests to the amateurship of the author. But what he meant to convey was that in polluting the White House and the Capitol with their steps as they set them on fire, their spilt blood washed the foulness of their footsteps off the American soil: the British were made to pay an onerous price in blood. However, once Gwen Berry had stumbled there, she could not help it, as her idiosyncrasy easily led her to construct that “slave” in the following couplet had to “logically,” if paradoxically, be making a reference to her ancestors, when in fact the word is far from it. These are the lines:
No refuge could save the hireling and slave
From the terror of flight and the gloom of the grave.
As historians and students of American history know, in fighting the Americans during the war of reference, apart from the French, the British were aided by Native American tribes whom the United States had displaced---and continue to displace---and stole their lands as expansion toward Canada was sought. In addition, since most of the British troops were engaged fighting the French back on their continent, mercenary soldiers, mostly from Germany, Poland, Switzerland, Denmark and other nearby countries were normally hired by enemy powers everywhere. And those are the “hireling” and the “slave” of the lyrics, who could not escape fleeing in terror, and whom only the gloom of the grave awaited once they had trespassed into the “land of the free and the home of the brave” where, contrary to the expectation and boasts of the enemy, the American Flag still triumphally waved. Nothing “disrespectful” here.
Talk about being mentally a slave! It is that idiosyncratic mode of thinking that is enacted in Gwen’s turning away from the American flag and in her anger toward the Anthem, as I suspect is her attitude toward everything else in which she and others of the same cast of mind misread and misinterpret as “racism” and “white supremacy.” Whoever seeks to understand the essence of Wokism-Lenenism needs only to pay methodic attention to some elements of idiosyncratic in the mode of thoughts of Black Americans and which through the indoctrination of the academic and cultural establishments, and through the media are now in the process of being transmitted and assimilated by segments of the white population For instance, it is this idiosyncrasy, this mode of thought that has now acquired officialdom status in the Biden government and the American military. Not that anybody who counts is paying close attention to how this prosses will in the long run lead to the demise of this country. If you want to know how, grab your Tocqueville.
BTW: this is me offering you propaedeutics on ethological awareness. Unfortunately, ethological inquiry into idiosyncratic understanding of life and interpretation of facts is not much favored by the academic establishment or the media, especially when it would concern itself with the races. And yet, it is a legitimate scientific approach that could go a long way in shedding light on what exactly is happening in a society when suddenly half of its people begin to see “racism” practically everywhere, and where such claims are taken at face-value by both the supposed victims and the supposed perpetrators.
The Anthem’s lyrics are, in my taste, lacking: it is thoroughly bad poetry, metrically fallible, historically inaccurate, and too long and repetitive. But thing it is not is racist----whatever that word means.