Redskins

The existence of team mascot names in sports is, of course, a little silly.  When we watch a game, we can plainly see that the participants are people and not big jungles cats, little red songbirds, or venomous snakes. But we cut the whole idea some slack because it’s been that way in competitive team sports for a long time and, even though we know it’s a bit goofy to linguistically convert ordinary people into birds and bad-ass animals, we take it with a grain of salt.

But there are some names we need to give more careful consideration to.

For those who consider the controversy surrounding Washington’s NFL team to have been manufactured by the excessively politically correct  – just another cause fueled by liberal hypersensitivity and not worth worrying about-- imagine your 5-year-old coming home from school and announcing that he’s made a new friend.

“Great!  What’s his name?”

“Jimmy Jones.  He sits right behind me.  He’s a redskin!”

Some may see this usage as being not quite as poisonous as an announcement by your kid that his new friend was a nigger or a spic or a kike, but it certainly shares the coarse and degrading spirit of those snarlingly ugly labels.  Unless you’re a member of that thankfully small segment of society that uses this sort of language routinely and means it, you would be at least taken aback by this use of the word redskin.

 

You would chalk it up to innocence and ignorance and you would set the lad straight regarding the use of perjorative racial terminology.  And you would do that not because you’re excessively touchy about such things but because you are a decent member of a society that finds those sorts of usages ignorant, impolite, uncivil, and possibly dangerous.  In short, you would not be accused of being overly sensitive should you gasp at your child’s use of the word redskin to identify and describe a fellow human being.

And so it is with the controversy over the Washington Redskins name.  It seems fair to say that people are not being overly sensitive when they question the use of an appellation for a football team that would immediately be deemed an unacceptable racial slur when it came out of the mouth of a kid. 

Washington fans who want to keep the name because they're just really, really attached to it need to get a life.  Do they really, truly care what animal, vegetable, or mineral the team is called? Or are they going to seriously argue, as the team’s owner has, that to renounce an ugly and pointless racial insult is something that shouldn’t be done because it would defile a venerated tradition? 

This is, really, a no-brainer  -- not number one on the world problem list, but a fix that is simple to do and simple to understand why.

Somewhat more subtle considerations surround the names Braves and Indians, but they would seem to have at least one foot on the same slippery slope, if only because they seem intended to convey ferocity and aggressiveness in the same way that animal names do – Tigers, Lions, Bears, Wildcats, Bulldogs, etc.  As team names, they are less overtly perjorative than Redskins, but they are still tone-deaf, in the same way that names like the San Francisco Jews or the Dallas African-Americans would be. We will see what, if anything, happens in Cleveland and Atlanta. 

Here is a discussion in Wikipedia on the use of Native American names as team mascots, including a short history of organizations that have changed their name.