USA TODAY International Edition
National anthem and our racial reckoning
NBA reverses Cuban, but that won’t stop change
On the same day of the impeachment trial, when an ugly strain of white nationalism was played back on video to the U. S. Senate, Mark Cuban confirmed on Feb. 9 that his NBA Dallas Mavericks no longer opened games with the national anthem.
A day later, the NBA quickly reversed Cuban and said all league teams will play the anthem “in keeping with longstanding league policy.” So, for the moment, the issue is moot. But Cuban’s aborted plan is part of a growing effort to chisel away at our national identity and address our growing discomfort with overt signs of patriotism.
The anthem at sporting events once made us feel part of something large — a people united by our perseverance through two world wars and the Great Depression. Older Americans remember things began to fray during the Vietnam War. The anti- war movement merged with other causes to demand equal rights for women, Black people and migrant farm workers. And our modern world was born.
For years after, our sense of nationhood ebbed and flowed, reaching its highest pitch during 9/ 11. In the past five years, national cohesion has eroded with ever deepening political divisions. An older generation that knew the unifying spirit of World War II has begun to mourn.
Mark Cuban is the new world coming fast. He would pull the plug on the national anthem because five years ago, Colin Kaepernick began taking a knee during the anthem at San Francisco 49ers games. Kaepernick was stepping back from the American family after San Francisco police fired 21 rounds into the body of Mario Woods, a Black man suspected in a knife attack.
“I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses Black people and people of color,” Kaepernick said.
What few have understood about Kaepernick is that he embodies a movement turning increasingly away from the traditional civil rights of Martin Luther King Jr. and toward the politics of King’s more radical contemporaries. The former NFL quarterback finds his inspiration in the words of Angela Davis, Huey P. Newton, Malcolm X — the militant dead- enders of the civil rights era.
Newton was part of a Black Panther movement that went to war with the American law enforcement that had brutalized Black men. Today, Kaepernick is advancing the message with a program for Black children loosely based on the 10- point rights of the Black Panthers.
This modern civil rights movement is more hard- edged than King’s. For old- timers, even people of color who once followed King, this is disquieting. You can’t stop what’s coming. But what’s coming isn’t clear. Indeed, demographers have been missing an important development in our shifting racial- ethnic profile that forecasts nonwhites will outnumber whites by 2050, sociologist Richard Alba told The Wall Street Journal recently. “The majority minority narrative is wrong,” said Alba, a professor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.
Alba, who voted for President Joe Biden and describes himself as “a liberal with centrist leanings,” told The Journal, “The surge in mixing across ethnoracial lines is one of the most important and unheralded developments of our time.”
The demographic shift expresses itself in startling ways. The Republican Party, despite its full dive into Donald Trump’s white identity politics, “improved ( its) standing significantly among Hispanic voters and made smaller strides among other groups,” such as Asian Americans, Blacks and Muslims, The Journal reported. In California, Asian Americans and other minority groups led the fight to overwhelmingly defeat Proposition 16 that would have reinstated affirmative action — government and university favoritism based on race, sex, color and ethnicity.
In my own extended family, which 25 years ago was all white and today incudes African Americans, Latinos and Pacific Islanders, we recently had our first discussion about racial profiling that involved one of our own. My niece’s husband was singled out by skin color by a security guard at a Big Box store. He’s a darkly complected young Tongan, a person of highest character. All of us in the family were incensed. Those of us who are white learned something valuable.
This young Tongan man is also the most conservative member of our family. He grew up sleeping on dirt floors. He had few material things as a child and is deeply grateful to live in this country. He gets annoyed with leftist radicals and minority activists who can only see the nation’s defects.
He’s also a big sports fan. His first love is the NFL’s Green Bay Packers. I asked him whether he heard what Mark Cuban had done with the national anthem. He had. He was miffed: “I think I’ll have to stop watching basketball for a while.”
I told him the NBA had reversed Cuban, and his mood warmed: “Oh, maybe I will watch basketball.”