In spring 2019, two professional American sports teams cut ties with Kate Smith’s 1939 rendition of one of America’s most popular anthems, “God Bless America.”
The New York Yankees and the Philadelphia Flyers made the decision after the teams were notified of the racist language in some of the artist’s other recorded songs. Previously, “God Bless America” had been played during the seventh-inning stretch of Yankees games since the attacks of 9/11, and before Flyers games since 1969. There was also a statue of Smith, who regularly performed the song live at Flyers games, in front of their stadium since 1987, which has also been taken down.
One of the controversial songs that has put Smith under the spotlight is “Pickaninny Heaven,” which she performed for the 1933 film Hello, Everybody! In it, she asks "colored children" living in an orphanage to dream about a magical place of "great big watermelons.” In another song, called “That’s Why Darkies Were Born,” she sings: “Someone had to pick the cotton / Someone had to plant the corn / Someone had to slave and be able to sing / That's why darkies were born.” Both songs were rooted in the spirit of minstrelsy, but some say the song [“That’s Why Darkies Were Born”] was satire, or that Smith’s lyrics were a reflection of the time.
“Eighty-eight years ago, she did something that was, at the time, an acceptable means of conversation,” Ernie Troiano Jr., the mayor of Wildwood, New Jersey, told The New York Times. “I’m not saying it was right, but the times were different.” Troiano has been vocal in his support of Smith’s version of “God Bless America,” a version that is played daily in the summer on a boardwalk along the state’s beachfront. He has no plans on ending this tradition and has suggested that the Flyers statue of Smith be brought to the Jersey Shore.
“This woman was not a racist,” he told the Times. “I mean this woman, she gave a lot to her country. Hell, she got the Medal of Freedom.” But being a “patriot” doesn’t exempt her from being racist. (Christopher Columbus’s racism got him his very own American holiday.) In reality, racism and patriotism go hand-in-hand. American music, specifically, can testify to the racist ideas that have been a pervasive part of our country’s history.
There’s “Dixie,” a song so “southern” that the region eventually took on its name. Daniel Decatur Emmett is credited for writing “Dixie,” but some people believe Emmett got the song from two African-American brothers. “Dixie” started out as a minstrel song, depicting happy, enslaved people in 1859, but once it reached the South, it became the unofficial anthem of the Confederacy. The song was also part of the score for the controversial movie The Birth of a Nation, the film that played a significant role in the revival of the Ku Klux Klan and the amplification of white supremacy; and in the 1950’s, according to NPR, it was sung by white women protesting the integration of schools. For generations since then, it has been played on school campuses.
It’s only been during the past few years that high schools and colleges in the South have started to reconsider their relationship with the song. Still, letting go of the Southern anthem hasn’t been supported by everyone. In 2009, when the University of Mississippi attempted to stop playing another Dixie-related song, “From Dixie With Love,” due to fans chanting “the South will rise again” as it played, a group of Ku Klux Klan members responded by holding a rally.
Then there’s the American anthem, “The Star-Spangled Banner.” It was written by a slave-owning Washington lawyer, Francis Scott Key, who referred to African-Americans as “a distinct and inferior race of people, which all experience proves to be the greatest evil that afflicts a community.” In the national anthem’s lesser known third stanza, he wrote: “No refuge could save the hireling and slave / From the terror of flight, or the gloom of the grave.”
There’s also the phrase “the land of the free”: Key wrote the poem that would eventually become the national anthem in 1814, during a time when black Americans were not free; slavery ended in 1865, making it even clearer that this anthem was written to celebrate the land of the free — white Americans. A famous black athlete once said, "I cannot stand and sing the anthem. I cannot salute the flag. I know that I am a black man in a white world."
No, that isn’t a Colin Kaepernick quote — Jackie Robinson said those words in his 1972 autobiography. Kaepernick and Robinson aren’t anomalies for tackling the anthem’s key role in the reconciliation of what it means to be black and American. At the 1968 Olympics, Tommie Smith and John Carlos famously held up their fists during the national anthem. In 1959, at the Pan Am Games, Rose Robinson is believed to have been the first black athlete to refuse to stand for the national anthem.
Their struggle speaks to the concept of double consciousness, described by W.E.B. Du Bois in 1897. In an essay for The Atlantic, Du Bois wrote, “One feels his two-ness, — an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.”
Double consciousness, that “two-ness,” is still a very real concept, and figures like Kaepernick have been reminding our country of it for years. Even for songs that have no ties with problematic historic figures and aren’t blatantly racist with “hidden stanzas,” the picturesque portrait of America these songs paint doesn’t align with the black experience, which is filled with mass incarceration, cruel and unjust murders, and policies put in place to continue the American tradition of systemic oppression.
Patriotism is defined as “love for or devotion to one's country.” As black people, we’re expected to shut up and sing these songs that, for so long, declared and celebrated freedom that specifically excluded us; freedom that, in 2019, still doesn’t feel applicable to us. People, like Mayor Troiano, who — in the name of tradition and patriotism — continue to defend the racist behavior of historic figures by referencing what was “acceptable” at the time are a problem, as those figures are. Just because racist behavior was widely accepted among white people doesn’t make that behavior right. Slavery was widely accepted for years. Does that make it less egregious? Once we know better, we have a responsibility to do better. If we don't, we're complicit in the continuation of racist traditions and behaviors that have been upheld in America since the first colonizers arrived.
Editor's note: This article was originally published on May 14, 2019.
Get the Teen Vogue Take. Sign up for the Teen Vogue weekly email.
Want more from Teen Vogue? Check this out: The Political and Traumatic History of Blackface, Explained