Bill Maher hits back at Whoopi Goldberg over ‘Black national anthem’

HBO host Bill Maher fired back at “The View” host Whoopi Goldberg on Friday after Goldberg criticized his comments regarding the NFL playing “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” known as the Black national anthem, before games.

During Friday’s episode of “Real Time with Bill Maher,” Maher said, “The only time there should be two national anthems is when the other team is from Canada.” 

“There’s not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America. There’s the United States of America.” – @BarackObama pic.twitter.com/LABHXnexfQ

— Bill Maher (@billmaher) September 25, 2021

Earlier this month, Maher criticized the NFL after the song was played before the 2021 season opener between the Dallas Cowboys and Tampa Bay Buccaneers.

Maher said that playing the song, combined with other trends of separating white and Black students on college campuses, amounted to “segregation … under a different name.”  

Several days later, during an episode of “The View,” Goldberg said that “we’re having to reeducate people” on how to treat women and minorities because “we have gone backwards a good 10, 15 years.”

She added that “Lift Every Voice and Sing” is considered the Black national anthem because “the separation of the anthems has been so clear to us.”

“Now, maybe other people don’t feel like that, but I feel like we have to reeducate and retell people. We don’t think rape humor’s funny,” Goldberg said. “We don’t think talking about Native American people in a really despicable way is not funny.”

Maher on Friday said that Goldberg’s comments “seemed to be a lot about a need to school me on the Black national anthem itself” without discussing his main point.  

“When it comes to an anthem, it doesn’t have to be the one that we currently use, but it has to be just one, you know, because it’s a national anthem,” Maher said.

“And symbols of unity matter,” he continued. “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 10 years ago, and it shouldn’t be where we are now.”

Maher further criticized the trend of separate accommodations for white and Black students on college campuses, pointing to surveys and news stories of colleges offering segregated accommodations such as gyms and orientations. 

“We need to stop regarding this new woke segregation as if it’s some sort of cultural advancement. It’s not,” Maher said.