Bill Maher doubled down on his opposition to the Black national anthem. Earlier this month, Maher slammed the NFL for its inclusion of “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” suggesting playing the Black national anthem alongside “The Star-Spangled Banner” at each football game is “segregation under a different name.”
The “Real Time” host argued that Martin Luther King and many others fought extremely hard to end segregation while pointing to colleges which now offer segregated residences, and segregated graduation ceremonies.
“Well, congratulations, liberal parents. You just paid 100 grand for your kid to move to Biloxi, Mississippi in 1948,” Maher quipped. “I mean, we’re a nation that professes diversity as our strength. But now half the kids’ dorm rooms are determined by racial purity?… You see what I mean about becoming so woke, you come back out the racist side?”
“Because what’s next? What follows separate dorms, anthems, ceremonies, cafes, gyms, separate neighborhoods? That was red-lining! They wouldn’t let Black people live in the town where I grew up. Then they do. The word for that is ‘progress.’ It’s where the term ‘progressive’ comes from. Most Americans, including nearly 80% of African Americans, want to live in racially diverse neighborhoods.
He invokes the words of Barack Obama, who said, “There is not a Black America, and a white America, and Latino America, an Asian American, there’s a United States of America.”
He got criticized about that by Whoopie Goldberg on “The View“, which only made him dive into the topic even further.
“I think because we have gone backwards a good 10-15 years, we’re having to re-educate people,” Goldberg said.
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“The program ‘The View’ last week devoted a lot of time to this while somehow avoiding what I actually said,” Maher said. “It seemed to be a lot about a need to school me about the Black national anthem itself. Whoopi Goldberg said, quote, ‘We’re having to re-educate people.’ Because nothing ever goes wrong when you start talking about re-education. Just ask Chairman Mao. Maybe we can set up some sort of camps.”
The HBO star defended the “crazy idea” that “segregating by race is bad.” “Symbols of unity matter. And purposefully fragmenting things by race reinforces a terrible message that we are two nations hopelessly drifting apart from each other. That’s not where we were even ten years ago and it’s not where we should be now,” Maher told his audience.
“If we have two anthems, why not three? Or five? Why not a women’s anthem? A Latino anthem? A gay, trans, Indigenous Peoples, an Asian and Pacific Islander anthem? Because ‘I’m not dealing with you, I’m not speaking to you’ is not a way you can run a country and most people of all backgrounds understand that already and don’t even want to try to do it that way,” Maher said.
“I’m not out of step! Believing in separate but equal? That’s out of step — by 67 years. It was 67 years ago, in 1954, when the Supreme Court handed down their landmark Brown v. Board of Education ruling which said ‘separate but equal’ isn’t what we do here. We decided we’re going to try to make this work together.”
“The Black silent majority seems to be behind the idea that you can’t have a melting pot with two pots! Yes, America was born from the original sin of slavery and redress for that is still in order but not at the cost of destroying a country that most Black people now have found a decent life in with a relatively higher standard of living and don’t want to lose. And Balkanizing our nation will certainly cause us to lose it.
“We need to stop regarding this new woke segregation as if it’s some sort of cultural advancement. It’s not. … Countries do disintegrate into madness when they indulge their separatist tendencies; Hutus slaughtering Tutsis in Rwanda, Catholics and Protestants in Ireland, Sunnis and Shiites in Iraq, Hindus and Muslims in Kashmir, everyone in Afghanistan and that one Jew. We need to unite as one nation who come together and sing one anthem always out of key,” Maher added.
