It would have been inconceivable just a few years ago, but the long tradition of playing the national anthem before sporting events in the United States of America is legitimately debated.
The topic came up again over the weekend, after the National Women’s Soccer League became the first team sports league in North America to resume amid the coronavirus pandemic and, more pertinently, the first in returning since the murder of George Floyd sparked worldwide outrage. As “The Star-Spangled Banner” played before the first nationally televised NWSL Challenge Cup game on Saturday, all participants from the North Carolina Courage and Portland Thorns knelt to protest systemic racism and police brutality and to support the Black Lives Matter movement.
In the wake of the death of Floyd and others, most Americans now support athletes who kneel peacefully and quietly during the anthem, a Yahoo News poll recently showed. That wasn’t the case when then-NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick started practice in 2016, or when the star of the U.S. women’s national team, Megan Rapinoe, became one of the first white athletes to join. to him when he knelt before a couple of USWNT games later that year. .
Leagues and governing bodies have tried (and mostly failed) to figure out how to respond appropriately since then. The NFL initially banned kneeling during the anthem, then quickly changed its mind as additional players in addition to Kaepernick continued to kneel during the 2019 season. The US Soccer Federation implemented an anti-knee rule that remained in effect for three years before being eliminated earlier this month under pressure from the media and its own players. Since then, calls to stop playing the anthem before national sporting events have grown louder.
As the first league since Floyd’s death, the NWSL leadership knew that its players wanted to make a statement and therefore wanted to play the anthem. Major League Soccer, on the other hand, said it would not play the anthem before games when it starts its own summer tournament in Orlando, Florida on July 8.
Apparently, the decision was made because the health crisis will prevent fans from attending.
The reality is that not having fans present also gives leagues a convenient excuse to avoid controversy altogether. In a way, getting rid of the anthem now feels like evasion, an easy way to let leagues and fans have to deal with serious problems that they have to face.
Playing the national anthem at sporting events provides athletes with one of the highest-profile platforms to protest imaginable. (AP Photo / Jeff Chiu)
Over the past month or so, a significant portion of the population of the United States has been forced to confront those truths in a direct and meaningful way for the first time in their lives. To achieve lasting change, those difficult conversations must continue to happen.
One of the most passionate voices from the first weekend of the NWSL came from Red Stars defender Sarah Gorden. “I will stop when people behind bars are not disproportionately black or Latino,” Gorden wrote on Instagram. “When my son can go to his neighborhood school because he has the same resources that we ask for in the rich white neighborhood.
“I will stand up when the country looks the same to my black son as it does to his white son / daughter,” he continued, noting the disproportionate wealth gap and maternal mortality rates between races. “Until then, I kneel down.”
There is a case to get rid of the anthem before national sporting events. But Gorden’s problems are going nowhere, and not playing the anthem anymore keeps people from really wondering what kind of country they want to leave their children, what side of history they want to be on.
