A black actor and activist said Sunday that playing the national anthem was a government ploy to recruit citizens to go kill people overseas.
Jesse Williams, an actor on “Grey’s Anatomy,” made the declaration while speaking to MSNBC host Thomas Roberts about the outrage over National Football League football players kneeling during the national anthem.
“I think it’s also important to realize that this anthem thing is a scam,” Williams said on MSNBC. “This is not a part of football. [The pregame national anthem] was invented in 2009 from the government [by] paying the NFL to market military recruitment — to get more people to fight wars to die. This has nothing to do with NFL or American pastime or more tradition. This is to get boys and girls to go fly overseas and go kill people.”
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Various football player knelt Sunday night before the games as the anthem played to show solidarity with Colin Kaepernick, the former San Francisco 49ers player who began kneeling last year. President Donald Trump said the NFL needs to fire players who don’t stand during the anthem during a Friday night rally in Alabama.
Williams gave a speech last year at the Black Entertainment Awards where he declared the “invention of whiteness” wanted to use black people for their culture and then get rid of them.
“We’ve been floating this country on credit for centuries, yo, and we’re done watching and waiting while this invention called whiteness uses and abuses us, burying black people out of sight and out of mind while extracting our culture, our dollars, our entertainment like oil — black gold, ghettoizing and demeaning our creations then stealing them, gentrifying our genius and then trying us on like costumes before discarding our bodies like rinds of strange fruit,” he said to a round of applause.
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