Last football season was marked by a media blitz on the Washington Redskins’ odious team name. Use of the full team name in broadcasts was down 27 percent in 2014 compared to 2013, according to a Deadspin analysis.
I was hopeful that pressure on owner Dan Snyder — who, in a torrent of stupid said the word is a term of “honor and respect” — would carry over into 2015.
Or at least the media that had been so sanctimonious in its critique of Snyder and football fans in general would refuse to say or print the name and instead refer to the squad solely by geography.
So, I’ve been disappointed to turn on the TV and scroll through the news to find the team name getting the same air time as all the other team names that don’t conjure up a Trail of Tears.
We wouldn’t accept a football team named the Carolina Coons or the Wisconsin Wetbacks. There’s no California Crackers. How is the Redskins still a viable team name? All these putdowns are hideous, but for some reason one of them has managed to become acceptable for prime time, school, and the dinner table.
That reason, of course, is racism. Washington’s team name illuminates a dangerous form of hate: one people don’t recognize. I’ll admit, I never stopped to think about the disgusting meaning of “Redskins” until the #ChangeDCMascot campaign called attention to it. I didn’t question whether it was right to use a slur spat at the survivors of genocide as a name for a sport team. I accepted the name and all the ugly stereotypes it represents. But now that I am aware of my negligence, I cannot forget it. I am disappointed other media outlets have.
The case for keeping the slur/team name is that it’s tradition and it’s not meant as a putdown against Native Americans. These are the same as arguments people use to defend the Confederate Flag.
I don’t want to get into the history of the Confederate Flag or the term “Redskins” because I don’t need to; the fact that for the majority of the population these two things represent hate and inspire fear should be enough of a reason for the U.S. government and the capital’s sports team to put them away.
“Redskins” is so offensive that in July a federal judge ruled that the team couldn’t trademark it because the U.S. does not provide copyright protections for racist language. In California, state law has banned schools from using the name for sports teams, forcing four high schools to change their mascot and moniker. Then there’s the FCC, the vanguard in the battle against nip slips. In a ruling, the FCC, said it does not find the team name offensive; allowing for the continued use of the slur on television at any hour, on any channel.
We need to stop using exaggerated mockeries of the rituals and likenesses of an oppressed people, blending that stereotype with racist slurs and calling it a brand.
The National Football League should ban racist language from all of its team names, but this is the same league that spent the entire off-season trying to figure out whether some fairly irrelevant balls were properly inflated. I’m not waiting for the NFL to take action. The Advocate will not use the team’s name again unless there’s a very good reason. Until then, they will be known as the Washington team.
The Advocate isn’t the first paper to do this — and we’re not the most relevant (we are hardly Sports Illustrated) — but I hope we are not the last. There are very few instances in which the Advocate would publish a racist slur. And now a national team being stubbornly wed to hate will no longer qualify as one of those instances.•
Contact Kristin Palpini at editor@valleyadvocate.com.
