Photo Credit: Vanessa Williams/Instagram
For Independence Day, singer, actress and model Vanessa Williams was chosen to host the White House’s Capitol Fourth Celebration. Anyone with a television over the last 40 years knows she’s a class act and pretty much nothing could go wrong with her as a hosting pick. Well that is unless she chooses to sing the National Black Anthem.
Williams told the Associated Press in the run up to the show, “It’s in celebration of the wonderful opportunity that we now have to celebrate Juneteenth. So we are reflective of the times. We are reflective of the times and I’m happy to be part of a tremendous show that the producers are aware and willing to make the changes that have happened within the past year and a half.”
Mind you, her singing Lift Every Voice and Sing, affectionately known as the National Black Anthem wasn’t replacing the standard national anthem because that was sung by Grammy-award winner Renée Fleming. Still the outrage came in calling the performance divisive.
Florida Republican Congressional candidate Lavern Spicer tweeted, “Vanessa honey, a BLACK national anthem is something a Black African Country would have, not a country like America that exists for everyone.” Author Tim Young said, “Nothing will unite us more as a nation than separate but equal national anthems…”
The only positive to Lavern Spicer talking about Vanessa Williams singing the National black anthem was that lavern burned calories doing it. Keep striving to burn more. https://t.co/FUVT3Vt8b3
— JaVonni Brustow (@JaVonniBrustow) July 5, 2021
So, why do we have a national black anthem? Should I even explain this? Why is it that the people who like to talk about blacks needing two parent homes have them themselves and still choose to be ignorant? To start, the song speaks about black determination and accomplishment, juxtaposed to the national anthem that has words about hunting down and killing slaves, written by a man who prosecuted abolitionists and abolitionist sympathizers with death and it isn’t even an official song. There is no official National Black Anthem. So with that, it’s a rather irrelevant argument. and it’s a church hymn that’s existed long before we even had a national anthem. And were people not still slaves on Independence Day? Isn’t that why people celebrate Juneteenth and why that just became a federal holiday? There is an old Boondocks cartoon where a man’s face was shoved in a book and he was told “Read, n****, read.” Someone needs to do that to these people. And lastly, it was written to celebrate the birthday of Abe Lincoln.
I will add that in the Rules of Black History, the first one is not to disrespect Vanessa Williams. And Rules 2-3 state that you both do not disrespect the National Black Anthem and you don’t disrespect Vanessa Williams singing it. Both deserve ex-communication from society. This just summarizes how people simply want anything to complain about.