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View Full Version : Is the name "Redskins" Racist?



steve
10-03-2005, 01:21 PM
As a lifelong 'Skins fan, having followed the team from the days of my first grade lunch table debating the intricacies why NUMBER 44 was the most kick ass running back to the Tony Kornheiser "Bandwagon" years and beyond, I say HELL YES IT IS RACIST.

I still pull for the team. I watch them every week. We're on a roll (finally, it's been a while). But I haven't purchased a ticket to a game nor bought any team merchandise since I was in grade school...specifically because I decided a long time ago that this was a no-brainier.

But why, when you have a PERFECTLY GOOD NEW NICKNAME ("The Hogs") that both retains the team identity and cleverly pokes fun at the politics of the city, why is the team so defiant about this blatantly slanderous word, "Redskin"?

http://www.winchesterstar.com/TheWinchesterStar/030903/nnhog2.jpg

BrownSound1
10-03-2005, 02:51 PM
The whole sports nickname thing is stupid. I have several family members that are card carrying Native Americans, and not one of them are offended by the nicknames.

Hell, you don't see Irish people jumping up and down over Notre Dame's nickname.

Next thing you know some group will get pissed because the football is called a "pigskin."

conmee
10-03-2005, 07:25 PM
Well... I will say that "redskins" was used by the "white man" of which I am one... lol... as much as a derogatory term as "******," "spic," "chink," "Jap," along with dago, wop, kike, etc...

Bottom line is that that one particular term/nickname is really the only one I empathize with the native Americans of this country having a problem with. And I don't recall native Americans having to carry cards with them, Brown... what gives? lol ;)

There are alot of reasons people of native American decent/heritage "don't care" or have apathy toward the nicknames. Some people are more/less sensitive, etc. But weather you think it's offensive or not, the term "redskins" is certainly not denoting a particular attribute of a race/group of people in a positive light... and don't give me that shit about it's a fuckin' honor and the success of the franchise and it's on-field exploits is good for native Americans... that's bullshit. The Detroit ******s, the New York Kikes, and the San Francisco Yellowskinned Slants (the SF Homos are the pro soccer team) aren't going to see the light of day anytime soon, so neither should the goddam Redskins!!!! lol... I will champion the native American cause... :)

As far as Seminoles, etc... if they have an agreement with the local tribes and work to promote a positive image, and accurate representation of the culture, that's fine with me. And even stuff like the Fightin' Sioux or Fightin' Irish are fine, because you aren't degrading them on race/skin color, but on inability to hold alcohol and keep from roughing up the patrons at the local pub... uh.. .lol... ok, so those names could be construed as based on stereotypes... but nevertheless... redskins is one name that should be done away with... and while we're at it. It was founded in hatred, is a reminder to many of how insensitive the settlers/forefathers of this country were in terms of practicing a damn near genocide, and really is at the bottom of it all, a term rooted in ignorance.

So there. I'm on record as supporting the abolishment of the redskins name/logo. The other ones should be case-by-case...


GO IRISH!!!


Icon.

Mama's Fool
10-03-2005, 08:08 PM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/w...5&notFound=true


Interestingly, most of the people who sizzle with outrage over Indian team names and mascots are not Indians. American Indians can be found vigorously arguing on both sides. Academics are split, too: Anthropologists call team names and mascots humiliating, while linguists say "redskin" describes "stalwart attributes." Even dictionaries disagree (the Oxford English says "redskin" is "generally benign," while Webster's says it is "usually offensive").

The Redskins debate -- in addition to the latest condemnation from the Metropolitan Council of Governments, a challenge to the team's trademark is tied up in federal court -- focuses on the genesis of the name (was it born as an ethnic slur?) and its use today (does it denigrate Indians?).

There are at least three versions of the name's origin. The official story, says team spokesman Karl Swanson, is that when the Boston Braves football team left Braves Field to play at Fenway Park in 1933, owner George Preston Marshall needed a new name for his squad.

He chose Redskins in honor of Lone Star Dietz, the team's coach and an Indian who often wore an eagle feather headdress, beaded deerskin jacket and buckskin moccasins. Dietz brought four to six -- accounts vary -- Indian players with him to Boston from the Haskell Indian School in Kansas, where he had coached for four years.

Another version has the team being named for the white men who dressed up as Indians to stage the Boston Tea Party at the start of the American Revolution. Yet another genesis story says the name stems from the colored clay that Plains Indians used to paint themselves for tribal ceremonies.

Whichever version is right, "the reality is more benign than people on both sides of the fence are attributing to it," says sports historian and museum consultant Frank Ceresi. "The name was meant very, very positively."

The genesis may always remain murky because Marshall never wrote a word about his choice, the Boston newspapers from the time are silent on the question (football was a minor sideshow in those days), and survivors of the period offer conflicting and vague recollections. But it is clear that the Boston Redskins, who moved to Washington in 1937, sought to capitalize on their Indian players and coach: The team played wearing red war paint. And Indian players from the time considered the name and trappings an honor.

So does Walter Wetzel, former chairman of the Blackfoot tribe and president of the National Congress of American Indians in the 1960s. By the early '60s, the Redskins had dropped any reference to Indians in their logo, uniforms and merchandise. Wetzel went to the Redskins office with photos of Indians in full headdress.

"I said, 'I'd like to see an Indian on your helmets,' " which then sported a big "R" as the team logo, remembers Wetzel, now 86 and retired in Montana. Within weeks, the Redskins had a new logo, a composite Indian taken from the features in Wetzel's pictures. "It made us all so proud to have an Indian on a big-time team. . . . It's only a small group of radicals who oppose those names. Indians are proud of Indians."

Mama's Fool
10-03-2005, 08:11 PM
Another article. Not sure of the link, but makes the point about what a redskin (noun) actually is.






Redskins Controversy
The name of the Washington Redskins football team has long been controversial with many claiming, with more than a little justification, that the term redskin is racist and offensive. Recently, sportswriter Frank Deford weighed in on the controversy in a Sports Illustrated article. Leaving aside his opinion on the issue (he favors changing the name), Deford made the following claim in his article:

It's important to understand that "redskin" does not refer to skin color. It's not like, well, I'm a whiteskin and Shaquille O'Neal is a blackskin. A redskin was a scalp taken by Native Americans as bounty. The red in redskin is blood red. But the Nation's Capitol's football team adamantly holds onto its name.
From SI.com, 25 May 2005

Deford could not be more wrong on this. The term redskin does indeed refer to skin color. The OED2 dates redskin to 1699.

Ye firste Meetinge House was solid mayde to withstande ye wicked onsaults of ye Red Skins.
From S. Smith, 1699 (in H.E. Smith's Colonial Days)

The use of the adjective red to describe Native American skin color is even older, dating to 1587:

Hee maketh some folkes whyte, some blacke, some read, and some Tawny; and yet is hee but one selfesame Sunne.
From Arthur Golding, Mornay's Woorke concerning the trewnesse of the christian religion, 1587

This use of red to describe skin color predates the practice of scalping among Native Americans by nearly a century. The OED2 dates the verb to scalp from 1676 and the noun meaning a scalp taken as a Native American bounty to a year later.

Laying him for dead, they flead (or skulp'd) his head of skin and hair.
From Narrat. New-Eng., 1676

Two or three miles further they came up with some Heads, Scalps, and Hands cut off from the bodies of some of the English.
From William Hubbard's A narrative of the troubles with the Indians in New-England, 1677

Deford may be on the side of the angels in this argument, but he does no good by repeating contentions that are not based in fact.

Mama's Fool
10-03-2005, 08:12 PM
Here is an article about results of a survey done with Native Americans


'Redskins' mascot acceptable, poll says
More than 90 percent of American Indians not bothered by name

WASHINGTON - A poll of American Indians found that an overwhelming majority of them are not bothered by the name of the Washington Redskins.

Only 9 percent of those polled said the name of the NFL team is “offensive,” while 90 percent said it’s acceptable, according to the University of Pennsylvania’s National Annenberg Election Survey, released Friday.

Annenberg polled 768 Indians in every state except Hawaii and Alaska from Oct. 7, 2003, to Sept. 20, 2004.

MSNBC POLL

Mama's Fool
10-03-2005, 08:13 PM
As with most controversies, it is a very small minority of people that make an issue of something that the majority has no problem with.

thome
10-03-2005, 08:40 PM
You must be jokeing or you are the silliest little twit in the world.

Im Irish my skin turns REDDER THEN A M_F when im angry

IM the -REDMAN -not the Native Americans who i call BROTHERS .

PUNKS like you make me angry you and your crybaby cok suker attitude is the stupidest BS i have ever heard in my life!!!!

Put this in the Front line its the same PUSSY BULLSH@T!!

FIND A NEW BITCH ....BITCH this was played the day some ASSH@LE
twit invented it Many MOONS ago.

I aint jokin YOU ARE THE RACIST!:mad: :mad:

steve
10-03-2005, 11:14 PM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/09/16/AR2005091601640.html

Questionable Naming Rights
By Mike Wise
Saturday, September 17, 2005; Page E01
As you're drinking out of your Redskins mug Monday night while wearing your Redskins T-shirt -- supporting your make-believe Indians against those reviled Cowboys -- think long and hard about what a sweet way to "honor" a people that is. And, please, enough with this, "We're paying homage to the bravery and warrior mentality of the Native American." That's the same tired excuse Florida State University uses to continue the tradition of a student on horseback in full Hollywood regalia, chucking a flaming spear into the ground at midfield before football games, while thousands of people participate in the Tomahawk chop and the accompanying war chant also popular at Atlanta Braves games. The truth: The indigenous people of this continent were almost all hunters, gatherers, craftsmen and craftswomen before some of our ancestors nearly exterminated them and turned them into B-western caricatures.

I have been wanting to write about this issue since I got this job 18 months ago. The boss told me to hold out before I alienated most of the city, their pigmented Indian-face flags flopping along the Beltway on the way to FedEx Field on a September morning. All those liberal crusaders in the District and suburban Washington, working and writing for their own passionate causes but pleading ignorance on this one.

So I waited a year and observed, trying not be too judgmental, figuring I was just some knee-jerk newcomer who didn't get it.

I still don't get it.

Why, whether you're black or white, Hispanic or Asian, whether you're well off or getting by on public assistance, on the left or on the right, is most everyone okay with the term "Redskin?" Why am I still waiting for Daniel Snyder to understand that if his team's logo featured Mandingo tribesmen or orthodox Hasidics, it would be labeled racist and anti-Semitic?

The most disturbing part is, the Redskins annually present data rationalizing their callous insistence on keeping the name, putting poll numbers to support their cause in their own news releases, as if to say, "See, we have Indian friends." On Page 272 of the team's media guide, readers are even given a Reader's Digest version of where the term came from. "The term redskin . . . was inspired not by their natural complexion but by their fondness for vermillion makeup."

The team got its name in 1933 from the late owner George Preston Marshall. He wanted to pay tribute to the Indian ancestry of his coach at the time, William "Lone Star" Dietz. But a revealing story published two weeks ago in the Baltimore Sun, which focuses on new research by a California multicultural studies professor, discredits Dietz. Turns out he was a white man "who began taking on an Indian identity as a teenager and ultimately seized the past of a vanished Lakota tribesman and made it his own." The coach was convicted of misrepresenting his identity on military draft documents. So there was no American Indian for which the team was named, just a perpetuated stereotype of the time.

If the term "Redskins" was first used in the late 1580s, as the team says, it was also used when Europeans introduced commercial scalping to North America. Ask Suzan Harjo, the Cheyenne and Muskogee writer who is the lead plaintiff in a trademark lawsuit against the team dating from 1992.

In a telephone interview and a recent article, she gives a much more disturbing historical description than the one the team wants you to believe:
"When they started paying bounties for Indian bodies and Indian skulls as proof of an Indian kill, the trappers and mercenaries would come in with wagons full of men, women and children's bodies and with gunny sacks of heads. It became a transportation and storage problem, so bounty payers began to pay for scalps in lieu of skulls and bloody red skins in lieu of bodies."


I recently asked some of the Redskin players how they felt about the name. "It's hard for me to understand because our people weren't treated like that," said Joe Salave'a, whose ethnicity is Samoan. "But if that's how [American Indians] feel, it's something that needs to be dealt with."
"I understand the people who may have those complaints," said Ray Brown, the team's 42-year-old offensive lineman, who is black. "If I can assist them in any way, I would."

In an authentic, modest act of sensitivity, Brown tries not to refer to the team name in conversation. "I don't tell people I play for the Redskins," he said. "I just tell them I play for the 'Skins. When I sign autograph items, I do the same thing. I put 'Skins. It's my thing. I'm not saying everyone else should do it, but that's what I do."

Chad Morton, the former Washington kick returner who signed with the New York Giants this month, remembered seeing all the anti-nickname protesters before a team banquet in Virginia.

"I use to look at them and think, 'Why don't you guys do something else with your time?' " he said last year. "Now I look at them and think they're right. I mean, if you look at that logo and you really think about the name, it is racist."

In July, Native American groups won another chance to challenge trademarks encompassing the name and logo of the team. Last month, the team and the NFL filed a motion to rehear that decision.

You know how Snyder feels about the controversy? Ask his spokesman, Karl Swanson. "I know a guy who wants to paint the Redskins logo on the bottom of his swimming pool," Swanson said on a recent voice mail. "So he clearly has no problem there."

Don't they realize some folks feel the same way about the Confederate flag, the way others used to feel about Amos and Andy, about putting on black face? Until time told them they were wrong, that they should have known better.

I asked Swanson again to clarify the team's position over the phone on Monday. He said the team researched it, that neither he nor Snyder is responsible for the meanings and usage that came afterward. So, Swanson was asked, if the team were called the Washington Negroes or the D.C. Rabbis, there would be no public outrage.

"I don't know," he said.

I understand the logo is undeniably a cultural symbol to thousands.

When parents buy their children bedspreads and rain ponchos with the team's insignia on it -- as Snyder's parents did for him -- it becomes part of your life experience, a piece of personal history.

But it's not your history. It's not your cultural symbol. It never was. You co-opted it, seized someone else's identity and made it part of your own. When Native people try to explain that, you should listen -- just as you would listen when a black person tells you they don't appreciate the term "colored," just as you would listen when a well-educated person from Morgantown tells you it's no longer funny -- it never was -- to paint West Virginians as toothless, moonshine-sipping hayseeds.

thome
10-04-2005, 12:02 AM
Yep thats what i figured a race propagandist Twit of the worst kind.

No grasp of reality blinded by some other idiots words.

Paste up News reporter of news long gone and worthless when
first written .

This phenom is the pussy BS that really makes me the REDMAN!

Drive on world saver jesus you is !!

After you finish correcting all the meanings of words do me a favor.

Feed the Hungry Clothe the Naked.then ask them if they care
about the name of a football team.

steve
10-04-2005, 10:42 AM
I disagree.
Words mean things.
You can't be so liberal with words as to attribute any old thing you want to them.
Historical connotations mean something as well.
Certain nicknames like "Seminoles" or "Fighting Sioux" or even "Indians" could be used respectfully as part of the culture of an area. However... the term "Redskins" wasn't used to honor anyone. It was a slur...it was THE SLUR OF SLURS...a term invented for economizing the slaughter of human beings...equating the value of these people - your BROTHERS - to only bloody skins that were saved so the NUMBER of kills could be counted easier.

And who gives a SHIT what a poll says (that poll had to do with the Redskins MASCOT only, btw...the MSNBC article summerized it incorrectly). If something is WRONG, you stand by your opinion.

Murder by numbers, one two three, it's as easy to learn as your ABCs.

The NAME "Redskins" is a friggin' disgrace.

steve
10-04-2005, 11:06 AM
The rounding up of "red skins" was rudimentary technology to allow more efficient killing...technology that culminated with "advancements" that allowed the Nazi's killing of the Jews, Gypsies, etc.

How do you think Jews would react if a German Soccer term named themselves the "Kikes" (or a Japanese baseball club the "Nanking Rape Victims" or a NFL-Eurpoe team the "Dresden Napalm") but explained that they had "changed the meaning of the word" to something more positive through their teamwork and fair play? Jews wouldn't give a shit...they'd kick some German ass. But with the Redskins, because the genocide isn't as recent and folks have forgotten, we (as human beings) are supposed to bend over and take it? F that.

thome
10-04-2005, 11:15 AM
Four score and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth upon this continent a new nation: conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
Now we are engaged in a great civil war. . .testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated. . . can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war.

We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate. . .we cannot consecrate. . . we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember, what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.

It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us. . .that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion. . . that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain. . . that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom. . . and that government of the people. . .by the people. . .for the people. . . shall not perish from the earth.

**** The battle you speak of was won long ago you are a fear promoter a antagonist an use peoples ignorance to fuel your
agenda of hate and rearangement of the Freedom of America.
I Vote people of your temperment are looking for any reason to
change americans into self loathing idiots .You are not fooling Me
i know how you wish to chip away at the Constitution if you dont
see that, that is what your doing whoever is promting you is doing a great job?????
:mad: :mad: :mad: Sincerely , the red skin man.

steve
10-04-2005, 12:08 PM
The "battle"??

I mean, what's done is done...I ain't sayin' sit there and cry over dead In'juns all day long, but to be PROUD of it???

Man, that is just F'd up.

Both good and evil things have been done in the name of "America".

Killing the native "animals" (along with slavery) were the two most obvious.

"I can't hink of any [mistakes]" - George W. Bush.

conmee
10-04-2005, 01:09 PM
I'm fairly conservative, and as anti-politically correct as they come on most days. Some things are simply ridiculous, and yes, I believe a great majority of liberals want us to sit around and do the whole self-loathing thing, and beat ourselves up for generations past. It's ridiculous.

BUT... "redskins" is one of those few terms that carries alot of historical negative baggage, and short of costing a team money like it would to change the logo and name, why not try to make one small amend for the past?

Shit, it's not as if the native Americans are asking for war reparations (see the Japanese interment camp folks or the Hiroshima survivors or anyone even remotely related to a slave), just some simple lingual respect.

Yeah, let's not chip away at the Constitution, and go old school, where blacks and native Americans don't even count as full human beings for census purposes. lol

It's not a matter of changing all meanings of all words.... that's precisely the problem. Negative connotations rarely change... for the better... people just give up or don't care about some terms because the minority being offended is not vocal enough or without the power to affect change... look at how many people considered "faggot" appropriate just 20 years ago, and now, all hell breaks loose when the term is used in public forums.

Just because we can't adequately address world hunger, world peace, and the like, doesn't mean we stop trying. And the big difference is that changing "redskins" is a hell of a lot easier and shows goodwill and empathy and understanding.

Great... this fookin' thread has turned me into a blathering liberal...that's just great!!!! lmao

GO NATIVE AMERICANS!!!


Icon.


P.S. It's funny, in a city like San Francisco, Larry Kreuger, sports talk guy got fired a month or so ago for calling Manager Alou "brainless" and the "Caribbean players overpaid who can't hit." And he got FIRED!!!! lol Alou and the rest of the Giants organization labeled him "Satan" and a racist for chrissake!!!!! You can't speak the truth in this country anymore (Alou was fucking up, and the Caribbean players were wiffing at pitches), talk about destroying the constitution, but you can sure as hell continue to abuse the poor old Indian who don't mind the use of "redskins", hell, it's all fun and games, right? lol