Former NFL Player Burgess Owens Rips League Over ‘Black National Anthem’ Playing Before NFL Games

On Thursday, former NFL star Burgess Owens ripped into the football league over reports that the NFL will play “Lift Ev’ry Voice And Sing,” dubbed the “Black national anthem,” before all Week 1 games this season.

The retired safety suggested the move was in line with “trying” to “segregate” the nation “again.”

“There is no ‘black national anthem,'” Owens posted via Twitter. “Why does it feel like the country is trying to segregate again sometimes?”

Owens, an outspoken critic of the Left, won a Republican primary for a U.S. House of Representatives seat in Utah’s fourth congressional district the day before his NFL swipe.

An ESPN report published Thursday said the “Black national anthem” “is expected to be performed live or played before every Week 1 NFL game, and the league is considering a variety of other measures during the upcoming season to recognize victims of police brutality,” according to a source at The Undefeated.

Additionally, the NFL pledged $250 million in donations for “social justice” causes over the next ten years.

The recent moves by the league come after the death of George Floyd, a 46-year-old black man who died in late-May after an arrest captured on viral video showed an officer, who has since been charged with second-degree murder, holding his knee on Floyd’s neck for over eight minutes.

Black Lives Matter and Antifa protests over the death quickly morphed into rioting, looting, and the destruction of statues of historical figures across the nation.

Owens was not the only one to criticize the NFL’s reported move.

Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX), for example, blasted the league: “How many national anthems do we have?? Is there an Hispanic national anthem? An Asian-American national anthem? This is asinine. We are ONE America. E Pluribus Unum.”

“I didn’t know there were two national anthems— a white and black national anthem,” commented conservative author and TV host Mark Levin. “No matter.”

“The NFL can screw itself,” he added.

In recent years, the national anthem has inexplicably become a partisan issue.

Then-San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick began kneeling during the anthem before games back in 2016, claiming law enforcement, and America more broadly, was plagued by racism. Now-Nike sponsored Kaepernick, who began the anthem protest when he started to see little field time, claimed America was “oppressing” minorities and allowing cops to “murder” innocent people of color.

As noted by Bleacher Report, Owens is set to challenge incumbent Democratic Rep. Ben McAdams of Utah in November, following his primary win.

Owens, 68, “spent 10 seasons in the NFL,” the report added. “Seven of those years came with the New York Jets, and he ended his career with the Oakland/Los Angeles Raiders. He was a member of the Raiders team in 1980 that went on to beat the Philadelphia Eagles in Super Bowl XV.”