In case you missed, it in all the sensationalism surrounding sexual misconduct by politicians of both parties, the California NAACP recently labeled “The Star-Spangled Banner” as “racist.”To add insult to injury, California NAACP president Alice Huffman is lobbying legislators in California to support removing “The Star-Spangled Banner” as our national anthem. She’s called it one of the “most racist, pro-slavery, anti-black songs in the American lexicon.”All this blather about our national anthem being “racist” was news to me, reminiscent of “News of the Weird.” Still, my intellectual curiosity about the validity of the vitriol spewed by Huffman prompted me to poke around in search of the source of her discontent.I found the so-called “racist” lines in the long-obscure third stanza of Francis Scott Key’s manuscript, originally penned during the British bombarding of Fort McHenry in 1814: "Their blood has wash’d out their foul footstep’s pollution/No refuge could save the hireling and slave/From the terror of flight or the gloom of the grave."Some historians say the lines above celebrate the death of freed slaves who fought with the British, and against the Americans, in the War of 1812.