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'God Bless America' is the target — not Kate Smith

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Here are a few statues that actually exist:

A bust of Che Guevara glaring at a hillside in Bolivia.A statue of Lucifer in Madrid, Spain, and another in Belgium.There are statues of Karl Marx, Stalin, and Lenin all over the world, including a statue of Lenin in Seattle.Same goes for Mao Zedong, who is responsible for roughly 30 million deaths.Just outside a former ghetto in Warsaw, there was a statue of Hitler kneeling in prayer. (It sold for $17 million at Christies in New York.)There's a monument to a fascist soldier in Chicago that was gifted by Italian fascist dictator Benito Mussolini adored.A large statue of a naked man standing on naked women in a cemetery in Brooklyn.There's a statue of a policewoman urinating in Dresden, Germany.There's the infamous "Manneken Pis" statue in Brussels, which features a little boy peeing into a found and is, frankly, hilarious (they dress him up in little outfits depending on the season or holidays).RELATED: Recent Yale study proves the left's racist outrage is an act of projection

Here's a list of things that have been branded racist in the past couple of years:

Dogs/dog-walking.911 calls.TSA's body scanners.Classic literature/philosophy.Milk.Knitting.Being cheerful.Not being cheerful.Friendliness.Not being friendly enough.Libraries.Clowns.The Avengers.Diets.Infant mortality rates (that one comes from none other than Kamala Harris, by the way, who tweeted that "implicit racial bias is one critical reason that the maternal mortality rate for Black women is three to four times higher than white women." She blamed maternal mortality rates on racism.)Makeup.Personal space.Vikings.Potatoes.Inclusion.Burger King commercials.Okie-doke hand signs.Rainbows.Compliments.Childbirth.House plantsNail polish.Bacon (The New York Times made this flawless argument in an article titled "Donald Trump is Trying to Kill You").Trying to improve racial tensions.Not focusing constantly on racial tensions.Mentioning racial tensions.Existence (if white).

I could list of examples of perceived racism all day, because that seems to be the new standard: Everything is somehow racist. Every facet of life. Frankly, it's exhausting.

And, as you know, there's an incredible amount of overlap between statutes and perceived racism. I don't have to give you any examples, you already know what I'm talking about, but I will say that they've included Christopher Columbus, Thomas Jefferson, Francis Scott Key, Abraham Lincoln, and Joan of Arc, among many, many others.

The most recent example is as unexpected as the whole "walking your dogs is racist" claim. And, honestly, whoever made the claim clearly did some expert-level research. They worked really hard to find this so-called racism.

But it's also a little more nuanced than most of the above examples.

The controversy centers on a statue of Kate Smith, a singer who once called "the Songbird of the South," who gained fame in the 1940s for her rendition of "God Bless America."

Smith's achievements are awe-inspiring. She performed for King George VI and Queen Elizabeth, at the White House shortly before the start of WW2. Ronald Reagan bestowed her with the Presidential Medal of Freedom. She's been credited helping defeat the Nazis thanks to an 18-hour broadcast in which she helped CBS raise over $100 million in war bonds.

And, for decades, both the New York Yankees and the Philadelphia Flyers played her version of "God Bless America" at home games. The Yankees had featured it in during the seventh inning since 9/11. The Flyers even had a statue of Smith outside their stadium. She had become the team's good-luck charm after she performed "God Bless America" before Game Six of the 1974 Stanley Cup finals, and the Flyers won.

Suddenly, Smith became known as a racist, undeserving of a statue, destined to be canceled and forgotten.

But this month, all of that changed. Suddenly, Smith became known as a racist, undeserving of a statue, destined to be canceled and forgotten.

The statement reads:

The Flyers have enjoyed a long and popular relationship with 'God Bless America,' as performed by the late Kate Smith...But in recent days, we learned that several of the songs Kate Smith performed in the 1930s include lyrics and sentiments that are incompatible with the values of our organization, and evoke painful and unacceptable themes.

The songs?

"That's Why Darkies Were Born" and "Pickaninny Heaven."

"Pickaninny" being an archaic derogatory word to describe black children. She performed the song in the 1933 movie "Hello,

Everybody!" In the scene, she devoted the song "a lot of little colored children living in an orphanage" and sang of how "great big watermelons roll around and get in your way" and "luscious pork chop bushes bloom right outside your doorway."

As for the other song, "That's Why Darkies Were Born," well, have a listen for yourself:

Kate Smith - That's Why Darkies Were Born - 1931youtu.be

Lyrics:

Someone had to pick the cotton/Someone had to plant the corn,

Someone had to slave and be able to sing/That's why darkies were born.

Someone had to laugh at trouble/Though he was tired and worn,

Had to be contented with any old thing/That's why darkies were born.

Based on that, it looks pretty bad for poor ole Kate Smith. But, as we see more often, the cries of "racism!" are in fact deeply ignorant, based on little more than emotion and sycophantic outrage.

Because the song, "That's Why Darkies Were Born" is purely satirical, as part of the 1931 Broadway revue "George White's Scandals" as a satire of white supremacists. Smith wrote the song with Paul Robeson, actor and civil rights activist. Robeson's father was literally a runaway slave.

Worse yet, both songs came at an early point in her career, in the 1930s, a time when works of satire like these were considered controversial, even dangerous, for the opposite reason. They are just two, largely insignificant, songs of the roughly 3,000 that she recorded over the course of her career.

Kate Smith's niece told USA Today:

Aunt Kathryn really did not see color. She didn't see a person's color. She was very in tune with a person's character. I've always thought that was a model, to not see a person's color but to see their character. And this is why I'm incredibly sad.

The message is clear: the left's outrage machine knows no bounds. Anything, even the fight against actual racism, can be deemed racist.

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