Bill Maher has slammed Whoopi Goldberg after she said that America needs a separate Black national anthem in order to “re-educate people.”
The 65-year-old comedian, talk show host, and political commentator’s comments are in relation to the song “Lift Every Voice and Sing” which is known as the unofficial Black national anthem. The song was originally written as a poem by NAACP leader James Weldon Johnson in 1900.
If you cast your minds back to two weeks ago, you may remember that Maher called out the National Football League after the song was played during the opening game between the Dallas Cowboys and Tampa Bay Buccaneers. While he insists that he doesn’t have a problem with the song, Maher says that he does have a problem with it playing alongside the traditional “Star Spangled Banner.” In his opinion, there should only ever be one National Anthem.
“The only time there should be two national anthems is when one of the teams is from Canada,” Maher said on his HBO show, Real Time with Bill Maher. Interestingly, he said that he would be happy to get rid of the traditional National Anthem and replace it with something else, “we just shouldn’t have two.” Maher went on to say that playing the song alongside the traditional National Anthem was essentially segregation. However, Goldberg didn’t agree with his initial comments, saying that having two Anthems is a great idea because people need to be “re-educated.”
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"We’re having to re-educate people," the 65-year-old EGOT winner said on The View, after his original comments sparked a huge discussion on the talk show. She said that it was important to have more than one National Anthem due to how minorities are currently being treated in the country. "We have gone backwards a good 10, 15 years," she continued. "Now, maybe other people don’t feel like that, but I feel like we have to re-educate and retell people. We don’t think rape humor’s funny. We don’t think talking about Native American people in a really despicable way is not funny."
The Real Time host didn’t agree with Goldberg's comments, and slammed her for what she said about the need to re-educate people. "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," he said on Friday's episode of his talk show.
"I am what you might call an old school liberal who was brought up with the crazy idea that segregating by race is bad. That's what I was talking about," he continued, before asking whether, by that logic, there should be a separate Anthem for women, gay people, and other races. "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."
Following the show, he quoted Barack Obama by sharing a very famous quote from the former president on Twitter: "There's not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America. There's the United States of America."
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