The controversy over NFL players kneeling during the national anthem has managed to become the number one issue in America, despite millions of US citizens in Puerto Rico living without water or power after Hurricane Maria. For protesting NFL players, like quarterback Colin Kaepernick, their demonstrations are about racism and police violence. “We will not stand for the injustice that has plagued people of color in this country,” the players of the Seattle Seahawks wrote in a Sunday statement explaining their unanimous decision to protest during the anthem.

President Trump, who kicked this controversy into high gear on Friday after calling Kaepernick a “son of a bitch” at a rally, sees the protests differently. “The issue of kneeling has nothing to do with race. It is about respect for our Country, Flag and National Anthem,” Trump tweeted on Monday. “NFL must respect this!”

If you step back and think about it for a bit, though, the idea that a sports league “must respect” the flag is actually very strange. We don’t listen to the national anthem at other mass cultural events. The latest Marvel film doesn’t open with “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

Nor is it normal, internationally speaking, for sports teams to play national anthems before domestic sporting events. You don’t hear “God Save the Queen” before English Premier League matches. When you ask non-Americans about the patriotic spectacle that suffuses American sports, they tend to find it bizarre.

Playing the national anthem before national sports games started for very specific historical reasons — the need to get the public to help the war effort during World Wars I and II, specifically. This justification no longer held after 1945, but leagues came to realize that infusing sports with patriotism was great advertising and continued the practice. The NFL playing the national anthem is less about genuine honor for the country and more a way of keeping fans invested in professional football.

The truth is that displays of patriotism have never been politically neutral displays of national unity; they’ve always had ulterior motivations and multiple meanings. Kneeling during the national anthem is no more inherently disrespectful than the NFL turning patriotic displays into a marketing tactic is. The fact that the president is singling out Kaepernick and other NFL players who are protesting racism says that despite what Trump says, this is very much about race.

Why Americans hear the national anthem before sports events

“The Star-Spangled Banner” is a poem written in 1814 the morning after a battle at Fort Henry in Baltimore, and was later set to an English drinking song. It only became America’s unofficial national anthem in 1916, when President Woodrow Wilson ordered its use at military and other national ceremonies (it took until 1931 for it to become official).

A year later, the United States entered World War I. This, as Mental Floss’s Matt Soniak explains, brought the song into use during sports events. The patriotic fervor stirred up by the war made the song popular — and thus, good business, as Major League Baseball discovered:

During the seventh-inning stretch of game one of the 1918 World Series, the band erupted into "The Star-Spangled Banner." The Cubs and Red Sox players faced the centerfield flag pole and stood at attention. The crowd, already on their feet, began to sing along and applauded at the end of the song. Given the positive reaction, the band played the song during the next two games, and when the Series moved to Boston, the Red Sox owner brought in a band and had the song played before the start of each remaining contest. After the war (and after the song was made the national anthem by a congressional resolution in 1931), the song continued to be played at baseball games, but only on special occasions like opening day, national holidays and World Series games.

It took World War II, Soniak writes, for the national anthem to become a staple of every game.

“During World War II, baseball games again became venues for large-scale displays of patriotism, and technological advances in public address systems allowed songs to be played without a band,” he explains. “‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ was played before games throughout the course of the war, and by the time the war was over, the pregame singing of the national anthem had become cemented as a baseball ritual, after which it spread to other sports.”

The key point to take from Soniak’s account is that this whole ritual, which we all take for granted, is the product of exceptional circumstances. World War I and World War II were massive military undertakings, which required enormous mobilization of civilians to support the war effort.

It makes sense that sports would be used as part of this: Playing the national anthem before games, and festooning them in patriotic imagery, helped remind sports audiences that their government needed them desperately. After the world wars, there was no major social need to weave militarism into the fabric of everyday life.

Yet the national anthem ritual survived the social conditions that gave rise to it. Every other major American sports league followed baseball’s lead, sometimes (as in the case of the NBA and NHL) after the war was over.

When Major League Soccer was founded in 1996, it felt like it had little choice but to play the national anthem — even though its international peers, like the Premier League, did not do the equivalent.

“At this point, it has become part of the tradition of playing a sporting event in America,” MLS spokesperson Dan Courtemanche told the New York Times’s Sam Borden at the time.

So today, we play the national anthem before sporting events ... because we play the national anthem before sporting events.

The NFL has a particular kind of patriotism in mind when it plays the national anthem

Today, the patriotic imagery at sports events has very little to do with actual patriotism — and everything to do with the league’s bottom line.

The easiest way to see this is to look at the history of the Super Bowl, as Michael Oriard does in his book Brand NFL. Oriard, a professor of English at Oregon State and a former NFL offensive lineman, finds that the NFL has long seen the big game’s patriotic trappings, like overflights by Air Force jets, as a way of selling the NFL writ large.

“The Super Bowl was chiefly an advertisement for NFL football, investing the game with ‘traditional American values,’” he writes.

The league has been acutely sensitive to the politics of its patriotic displays. In 1968, at the height of the controversy over the Vietnam War and hippie counterculture, the NFL positioned itself on the same side as Nixon’s “silent majority” — that is, in favor of the war effort and against mass protests. The highest “patriotism quotient,” according to Oriard, was at the 2002 Super Bowl, the first after 9/11.

But in 2006 and 2007, as public outrage at the Iraq War built, the league toned it down substantially. This, Oriard explains is, quite telling — it illustrates how the NFL thinks about patriotism as a branding exercise rather than any kind of genuine display of respect for the troops.

“The muting of patriotic display in 2006 and 2007 illustrates the NFL’s desire to connect with the popular mood, not promote any political agenda,” Oriard writes. “The NFL had by this time become hyperconscious of not alienating any part of its audience ... NFL vice president Roger Goodell disavowed ‘making any political statements’ this time, because it’s not our place.’”

The pregame national anthem isn’t a pure patriotic performance. It’s a pantomime, tapping into Americans’ national pride for profit. It’s turning “The Star-Spangled Banner” into an advertising jingle.

Of course the current controversy is about race

I go to a lot of games with my fiancée, who’s Canadian. She finds the over-the-top displays of American patriotism — the national anthem, the military imagery, the spotlighting of of service members at the game — off-putting.

Many Americans aren’t as sensitive to this, because we’re generally more comfortable with American national imagery. But patriotic symbols like the national anthem always conjure up some image of what it means to be a patriot in the listener. Such symbols allow multiple interpretations, meaning different things to different people at different times.

For instance, some veterans — the group you’d think would be most offended by Kaepernick’s gesture — have actually found his protest refreshing. Former Army Ranger Rory Fanning, who sat during the national anthem at Wrigley Field last year in solidarity with Kaepernick, explained why in an interview with Jacobin.

“Many soldiers thought they were going overseas to sacrifice for freedom and democracy. But they are not seeing those ideals being practiced in this country,” Fanning said. “Kaepernick’s protest is resonating with soldiers who feel like they’ve been lied to.”

To these veterans, “The Star-Spangled Banner” reminds them of the contrast between the ideals they thought they were sacrificing for and the muddy reality of American life. To other veterans, it means something different, and they’re offended by NFL players protesting the national anthem. But this divide isn’t unusual. The same could be said about any other group of Americans (or non-Americans who enjoy watching American sports).

Patriotic symbols aren’t simply displays of respect for the country, as Trump would have it. They have lots of different meanings — and for some African Americans like Kaepernick, one of those meanings is symbolic respect for institutions like the police that take part in their oppression. Hence why they choose to protest.

The fact that Trump chose to single out this particular protest, then, is rather telling. He’s saying that it’s wrong for black athletes to see professional sports’ rituals in the way they do. That it’s fine for the NFL to use patriotism to market itself but wrong for NFL players to use the opportunity the league created to draw attention to the problems of police violence and racism.

There is no universe where such an attack isn’t about race.