Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban is worth an estimated $4.3 billion. The team’s players have salaries ranging from $449,114 to $29 million for star Kristaps Porzingis. Yet the team ceased opening its games with the National Anthem for several weeks, in what Cuban later said was an experiment.
He has said not because they don’t love the U.S; rather, it’s because many feel the anthem “doesn’t represent them.”
The NBA quickly came out with a statement saying that all teams would be required to play the National Anthem; Cuban responded that the Mavericks would comply.
This is the rotten fruit of identity politics and racial division. As much as any other national symbol, the National Anthem unites—and represents—us all. Its message is martial, but not divisive. Penned by a captive American aboard a British warship in the War of 1812, the song is about an external threat and American steadfastness.
Where intersectional wokeness gets it all wrong is in refusing the see the good as well as the bad in our history. We can do both; we can acknowledge our nation’s shortcomings, but also recognize that nowhere else, in the history of the world, can someone like Cuban, the son of an automobile upholsterer, create a company like Broadcast.com and then sell it for billions.
It’s not about the wealth, of course. But it is about the opportunity. It’s also about the unity so many on the left are calling for, even as they take divisive stands on things like the National Anthem.
They’ve forgotten the point of that other national symbol, our motto: E Pluribus Unum—out of many one.
They’ve forgotten, too, that other grand experiment—the United States itself. As Abraham Lincoln famously said, a nation “conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”