In a couple of tweets, John Legend takes a stand with Colin Kaepernick and extends his protest to change the national anthem. He does this on reasonable grounds. Legend tweets, “My vote is for America the Beautiful. Star Spangled Banner is a weak song anyway. And then you read this…” He then references an article by The Intercept. His proceeding tweet says, “For those defending the current anthem, do you really, truly love that song? I don't and I'm very good at singing it. Like, one of the best." Coming off a bit arrogant, Legend still gets his point across; people who claim to love the song probably don’t know the contents of the third verse which is explained in the article that Legend links in his first tweet.
The article reveals the third verse in The Star Spangled Banner by Francis Scott Key:
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.
(https://theintercept.com/2016/08/28/colin-kaeperni...)
At the revelation of this third verse, it becomes incredibly apparent why someone, who has any bit of African-American heritage, would refuse to participate in the celebration of this song. It blatantly promotes slavery. “No refuge could save the hireling and slave” in this “land of the free." It seems like Francis Scott Key only intended these lyrics of freedom and bravery to pertain to the white man. This does not discount the fact that there were brave men who fought for the freedom of America from Britain. This cannot take away from the fact that the song explicitly supports slavery.
While John Legend focused in on the problem of the National Anthem, Kaepernick’s protest was a broader protest against the inconsistencies in the promises of America. He said that his protest was for the “people that are being oppressed." Where America promises life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, there are an immeasurable amount of people groups that do not experience these. Not only ethnic minorities but any people group divided by socioeconomic standing. There is a gross amount of social injustice in America that we just turn our backs on. Yes, there are a lot of things that America does right and does well, but there are some things, like social injustice, that we cannot afford to ignore anymore.
Hopefully Kaepernick’s protest can serve as a springboard to a paradigm shift in our level of awareness and empathy to the social injustices that go on in our own nation.
