Mark Cuban lost his battle to ditch the national anthem, but our racial reckoning isn't over

It was probably no accident that on the same day of the impeachment trial, when an ugly strain of white nationalism was played back on video to the U.S. Senate, Mark Cuban confirmed on Feb. 9 that his NBA Dallas Mavericks no longer opened games with the national anthem.

A day later, the NBA quickly reversed Cuban and said all league teams will play the anthem “in keeping with longstanding league policy.”

So, for the moment, the issue is moot.

But Cuban’s aborted plan is part of a growing effort to chisel away at our national identity and address our growing discomfort with overt signs of patriotism.

Our national cohesion is unraveling

The anthem at sporting events once made us feel part of something large — a people united by our perseverance through two world wars and the Great Depression. Older Americans remember things began to fray during the Vietnam War, when a rapidly growing younger generation decided it would no longer die fighting communism in Southeast Asia.

The anti-war movement merged with other causes to demand equal rights for women, Black people and migrant farm workers. And our modern world was born.

For years after, our sense of nationhood ebbed and flowed, reaching its highest pitch during 9/11 and sliding downward thereafter.

In the past five years, national cohesion has eroded with ever deepening political divisions. An older generation that knew the unifying spirit of World War II has begun to mourn.

As I watch those elderly Americans, I think back on the film “No Country For Old Men,” in which the past has turned quickly toward the future in West Texas. The modern world is unfamiliar and disturbing to men like Sheriff Ed Tom Bell, played by Tommy Lee Jones.

Don't let Jan. 6 go cold: Before we forget the Capitol attack, make domestic terrorism the top priority it should be

He visits his cousin, Ellis, a retired lawman who lives in a ramshackle home. From his wheelchair, Ellis says to the sheriff, “Loretta tells me you’re quittin’. How come you’re doin’ that?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” says Ed Tom. “I feel overmatched.”

Ellis looks at him hard and says, “You can’t stop what’s coming. It ain’t all waitin’ on you. That’s vanity.”

Cuban was influenced by Kaepernick

Mark Cuban is the new world coming fast. He would pull the plug on the national anthem because five years ago, Colin Kaepernick began taking a knee during the anthem at San Francisco 49ers games.

Kaepernick was stepping back from the American family after San Francisco police fired 21 rounds into the body of Mario Woods, a Black man suspected in a knife attack. To Kaepernick, it was the kind of overkill that throughout history has too often claimed Black men.

“I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses Black people and people of color,” Kaepernick said.

What few have understood about Kaepernick is that he embodies a movement turning increasingly away from the traditional civil rights of Martin Luther King Jr. and toward the politics of King’s more radical contemporaries. Kaepernick essentially carries the banner of Black nationalism and Black separatism, whose gears grinded to a halt not long after King’s nonviolent resistance led to policy triumphs in Washington, D.C.

The former NFL quarterback finds his inspiration in the words of Angela Davis, Huey P. Newton, Malcolm X — the militant dead-enders of the civil rights era.

Their aim is to dismantle institutions

Malcolm X, once a racist and Black supremacist, wanted to take up arms to end white bigotry. He spent much of his time damning and demoralizing mainstream civil rights leaders such as King, Ralph Abernathy and Hosea Williams. He called them chumps and sell-outs and called their March on Washington “The Farce on Washington.” Malcolm X was later assassinated by other Black radicals in the Nation of Islam after he had renounced the philosophy of Black racism and denounced Elijah Muhammad.

Huey Newton was part of a Black Panther movement that went to war with the American law enforcement that had brutalized Black men. To white Americans who condemned them, those Black militants would remind that in an earlier time, white Minutemen had gunned down their own oppressors — British redcoats.

Trump mob mentality: Leader with an armed following and a Capitol target

Today, Kaepernick is advancing the message with a program for Black children loosely based on the 10-point program of the Black Panthers.

This modern civil rights movement is more hard-edged, more pugnacious than King's — more Malcolm than Martin. Leaders of Black Lives Matter and other social justice movements are determined to dismantle the organizing ideals of the United States, including free-market capitalism. Their greater aim is to redistribute wealth and decision-making authority from what they view as the white power structure.

Racial lines are blurring

For old-timers, even people of color who once followed King, this is disquieting.

You can’t stop what’s coming.

But what’s coming isn’t clear.

Indeed, demographers have been missing an important development in our shifting racial-ethnic profile that forecasts nonwhites will outnumber whites by 2050, sociologist Richard Alba told The Wall Street Journal recently.

“The majority minority narrative is wrong,” said Alba, a professor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Alba, who voted for President Joe Biden and describes himself as “a liberal with centrist leanings,” told The Journal, “The surge in mixing across ethno-racial lines is one of the most important and unheralded developments of our time.”

Reported the newspaper:

“We’re entering a new era of mixed backgrounds,” Alba said. The phenomenon echoes the postwar era when white ethnic groups began to see their incomes rise, began to intermarry and gained greater acceptance in the American community, he said.

This shift is expressed in startling ways

Today’s demographic shift expresses itself in startling ways. The Republican Party, despite its full dive into Donald Trump’s white identity politics, “improved (its) standing significantly among Hispanic voters and made smaller strides among other groups, such as Asian-Americans, blacks and Muslims,” The Journal reported.

Cancel culture: Your barista, beauty blogger and fantasy author don't vote the same way you do. So what?

In California this past election, Asian Americans and other minority groups led the fight to overwhelmingly defeat Proposition 16 that would have reinstated affirmative action — government and university favoritism based on race, sex, color and ethnicity.

In Cupertino, California, Asian American parents are opposing efforts in public schools to teach critical race theory, which includes forcing “a class of third-graders to deconstruct their racial identities, then rank themselves according to their 'power and privilege',” according to the City Journal magazine. In those lessons, Asian American parents hear echoes of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. “(It divides society between) the oppressor and the oppressed, and since these identities are inborn characteristics people cannot change, the only way to change it is via violent revolution.”

Learning from our Tongan relative

In my own extended family, which 25 years ago was all white and today incudes African Americans, Latinos and Pacific Islanders, we recently had our first discussion about racial profiling that involved one of our own. My niece’s husband was singled out by skin color by a security guard at a Big Box store. He’s a darkly complected young Tongan, a person of highest character. All of us in the family were incensed. Those of us who are white learned something valuable.

Before you draw broader conclusions about that, understand that this young Tongan man is also the most conservative member of our family. He grew up sleeping on dirt floors. He had few material things as a child and is deeply grateful to live in this country. He gets annoyed with leftist radicals and minority activists who can only see the nation’s defects.

He’s also a big sports fan. His first love is the NFL's Green Bay Packers. I asked him whether he heard what Mark Cuban had done with the national anthem. He had. He was miffed: “I think I’ll have to stop watching basketball for a while.”

I told him the NBA had reversed Cuban, and his mood warmed: “Oh, maybe I will watch basketball.”

Phil Boas is editorial page editor of The Arizona Republic, where this column originally appeared. Follow him on Twitter: @boas_phil

You can read diverse opinions from our Board of Contributors and other writers on the Opinion front page, on Twitter @usatodayopinion and in our daily Opinion newsletter. To respond to a column, submit a comment to letters@usatoday.com.

This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Mark Cuban can't ditch national anthem, but the reckoning isn't over