Last week, the Journal ran an ad from a January 1955 issue. It was an advertisement announcing a baby shower for a child of one of the Humboldt Indians, the old junior hockey team here in town. The arena where the shower was to be held was the Humboldt Wigwam. The ad didn't quite make me uncomfortable, but it did get me thinking: when do nicknames, slogans and the like cross the line from harmless to offensive? Things have certainly changed here in Humboldt: we now have the Broncos and the Elgar Petersen Arena, and that's for the best.
But what about in Washington, DC? Well, down there Dan Snyder is at it again.
The owner of the NFL's Washington Redskins, who has long resisted calls for his team to change its overtly racist name, has proven once and for all he doesn't understand the concept of irony.
Recently, Snyder announced the creation of the Washington Redskins Original Americans Foundation, an organization created to benefit Native Americans. That's great, but it seems to me that Mr. Snyder could have omitted the word "Redskins" from the group's name; after all, that's what so many Native Americans and others objected to in the first place.
This sort of debate isn't just happening in the NFL, either: Early last month Bedford Road Collegiate in Saskatoon changed the name of its sports teams, formerly the Redmen; in January a minor football team in Ottawa changed its name from Redskins to Eagles. It's all part of a larger movement to reconsider stereotypical and even racist names for sports teams that seem to disproportionately involve Native Americans and Canadians.
Snyder and others who support the Redskins name and those similar to it often rely on appeals to tradition and history to justify the name.
"We will never change the name of the team," Snyder told USA TODAY last May. "As a lifelong Redskins fan, and I think that the Redskins fans understand the great tradition and what it's all about and what it means, so we feel pretty fortunate to be just working on next season. We'll never change the name. It's that simple. NEVER - you can use caps."
Snyder is right; the Redskins do have a great tradition. The team was founded in 1932 as the Boston Braves, before becoming the Washington Redskins in 1937. The Redskins have won three Super Bowls and two NFL Championships, earned before the 1970 AFL-NFL merger. It's one of the most famous, valuable and recognizable teams in the most popular professional sport in America.
Yet, is saying "We've always been the Redskins" good enough to justify a name that many find offensive, or even racist?
Consider this: in 1937, the year the Redskins arrived in Washington, there was one black member of Congress - Arthur W. Mitchell, a representative from Illinois. Mitchell was the first black Democrat to be elected to Congress. Before him, the party had been lily white. Was that ok, simply because it had always been that way? To borrow Snyder's own words, Arthur W. Mitchell interrupted the "great tradition" of the Democratic Party, yet I doubt Snyder would call Mitchell's election anything but a great event.
Why are Snyder and those who agree with him so oblivious to injustice when it's staring them right in the face? I think it has something to do with the fact that the Redskins name is tied to the relatively unimportant world of sports. We aren't talking electoral politics or racial discrimination here; no, it's just guys throwing around the pigskin. Why be so serious about a game?
That logic fails on many levels, not the least of which is that racism doesn't disappear when it comes to sports. Teams can't insulate themselves from the outside world simply because they are practitioners of nothing more than a children's game. They can't avoid serious issues because their form of entertainment is a break from serious issues for most people. It's not that easy.
Ultimately, the easiest way to tell that names like Redskins and Redmen are wrong is to divorce them from their pleasing context and history; forget about Joe Theismann and Robert Griffin Jr. and fantasy football and all those things that make the NFL great and dilute the poison that is the team's name down to its essential elements.
Then you'll see the problem.
If you still haven't, think about it this way: Would you be comfortable rooting for the Battlefords Blackskins or the Yorkton Yellowmen? Would you call a Native American or Canadian a redskin to his face? If all of the history and Super Bowls were stripped away, would the word be anything more than a cruel slur?
I didn't think so.
BC
