Obomba: Racism 'deeply rooted in our society'
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That's not the origin of the term, dunce, as much as you'd love it to be the case...
Indians were referring to themselves as redskins at least 100 years earlier than your photoshop, as evidenced in this 1769 passage by Chief Mosquito:
"I shall be pleased to have you come to speak to me yourself if you pitty our women and our children; and, if any redskins do you harm, I will be able to look after you even at the peril of my life."Comment
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Chief Mosquito?? What, his tribe didn't like him or something? You can't be no Chief if your name is Mosquito! If I was an Injun, I'd call myself Chief Buffalo Dong or something like that. Or Chief Bangsemall. Anything but Mosquito...American by birth. Southern by the grace of God.
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"The term redskin is a translation from native American languages of a term used by native Americans for themselves. Harjo's claim that it "had its origins in the practice of presenting bloody red skins and scalps as proof of Indian kill for bounty payments" is unsupported by any evidence.⁴ The term entered popular usage via the novels of James Fenimore Cooper. In the early- to mid-nineteenth century the term was neutral, not pejorative, and indeed was often used in contexts in which whites spoke of Indians in positive terms."
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I did an article on the origins of the name Redskins and why it may or may not be a racist term. I'll leave my opinion out of it and just post one of the articles I used as reference.
In 2005, the Indian language scholar Ives Goddard of the Smithsonian Institution published a remarkable and consequential study of*redskin's early history. His findings shifted the dates for the word's first appearance in print by more than a century and shed an awkward light on the contemporary debate. Goddard found, in summary, that "the actual origin of the word is entirely benign."
Redskin, he learned,*had not emerged first in English or any European language. The English term, in fact, derived from Native American phrases involving the color red in combination with terms for flesh, skin, and man. These phrases were part of a racial vocabulary that Indians often used to designate themselves in opposition to others whom they (like the Europeans) called*black,white, and so on.
But the language into which those terms for Indians were first translated was French. The tribes among whom the proto forms of*redskinfirst appeared lived in the area of the upper Mississippi River called Illinois country. Their extensive contact with French-speaking colonists, before the French pulled out of North America, led to these phrases being translated, in the 1760s, more or less literally as*peau-rouge*and only then into English asredskin. It bears mentioning that many such translators were mixed-blood Indians.
Half a century later,*redskin*began circulating. It was used at the White House when President Madison requested that various Indian tribes steer clear of an alliance with Britain. No Ears, a chief of the Little Osages, spoke in reply and one of his statements was translated as, "I know the manners of the whites and the red skins." Only in 2004, however, when the Papers of James Madison project at the University of Virginia reached the year 1812 did this and another use ofredskin*from the same meeting come to light.
The word became even more well known when the Meskwaki chief Black Thunder delivered a speech at a treaty conference after the War of 1812. Black Thunder, whose words were translated by an interpreter, said that he would speak calmly and without fear, adding, "I turn to all, red skins and white skins, and challenge an accusation against me."
In the coming years,*redskin*became a key element of the English-language rhetoric used by Indians and Americans alike to speak about each other and to each other. Goddard mentions numerous Indian speeches that were translated and printed in English-language newspapers. From such speeches, Goddard observes, James Fenimore Cooper almost certainly learned the word, which he then began using in his novels in the 1820s.
Goddard's paper methodically describes the term's early evolution, made possible by an unlikely abundance of documentation. "It is extremely unusual," he wrote, "to be able to document the emergence of a vernacular expression in such exact and elucidative detail."
Before all this recent scholarship, though, one could be forgiven for thinking*redskin*had emerged from hostilities with the white man. For many years the first citation in the*Oxford English Dictionary*was dated 1699 and purported to come from Samuel Smith. It read, "Ye firste Meetinge House was solid mayde to withstande ye wicked onsaults of ye Red Skins." It had been quoted from family papers in a book published in 1900 by Helen Evertson Smith.
But Goddard's research undermined this earliest of citations. First, he explains, Smith's words were "relentlessly antiqued"—made to appear older than they were. One giveaway was the use of*ye,*which was anachronistic for 1699. By investigating the underlying documentation Goddard further discovered a probable source for the quotation, bearing a different date and the word*Indian, which Helen Evertson Smith had modified to*redskin.
After Goddard, who serves as the*OED's main consultant on Indian language and culture, published his paper, the*Oxford*editors changed the entry. The*OED*now says the quotation was "subsequently found to be misattributed; the actual text was written in 1900 by an author claiming, for purposes of historical fiction, to be quoting an earlier letter."
Another major source for confusion has been Suzan Harjo, the Cheyenne-Creek activist who was an early plaintiff in the long-running case against the NFL. She has said on numerous occasions that*redskin*originated in "the practice of presenting bloody red skins and scalps as proof of Indian kill for bounty payments."
In 2005, Guy Gugliotta wrote about Goddard's paper in the*Washington Post, calling Goddard's research "exhaustive." But the article presented Harjo's claims alongside Goddard's, with the headline writer patronizing Goddard's findings by calling them an "alternative history."
Four years later, the*Post*published a column by Eva Rodriguez, trotting out the bloody-scalp origin story. Goddard responded by writing a letter to the editor. First, he stated clearly that only current feelings about the word were relevant to determining whetherredskin*is offensive today, and then he objected strenuously to Rodriguez's amateur scholarship:
What is not acceptable is for her to give as the only relevant historical fact the fictional claim that the word originally referred to scalps, for which there is no evidence.
But the*Post's letters editor would not allow Goddard to call the bloody-scalp claim "fictional," and so deleted the word from his letter.
Nonetheless, it is easy to see from 19th-century newspapers that the term did frequently appear in the context of violence by and against Indians. Stories about life-or-death encounters with hostile tribes can be found by searching*redskin*in Chronicling America, the National Digital Newspaper Database.
On May 13, 1836, the*Vermont Phoenixpublished "From the Legends of a Log Cabin: The Hunter's Perils," in which the narrator is tracking an Indian named Broadfoot, whom he is hoping to, in fact, scalp. The narrator complains to his companion:
Why Balt, I don't want a squaw's scalp, nor a papoose's, if I can get a warrior's . . . . Here we have been on a range four days and have not had a shot at a red-skin—man, woman or child.
A short story that ran in the*Illinois Free Trader and LaSalle County Commercial Advertiser*on June 4, 1841, describes a posse of white men, including a man named Wetzel, poised to fight Indians in order to win back a little white girl named Rose, whom the Indians have kidnapped:
'Old Cross-Fire,' repeated Wetzel, with rather a sneering emphasis, 'he's at the top and bottom of this business; and the very minute he finds himself hunted down by horsemen, he will scalp poor Rose, and then take good care to [get] himself and his cursed red-skin gang [out of] harm's way.
The same character Wetzel goes on to recall all the times he shot at Indians:
'I've laid for days and nights at a stretch, on the pint of that little island yander, watching the movements of the red-skins to get a chance to riddle their hides with my old woman here,'—and the hunter patted the breech of his gun with manifest affection.
Of course, the names of many peoples who have been at war have been used with an intention to demonize or denigrate. That we can find*Germans*spoken of with malice during World War II, though, does not makeGerman*slang or offensive. But the informal usage of*redskin*seems to have made it especially inviting to the creators of frontier tales.
Such contexts and, more importantly, the violent history of U.S. Indian policy, help explain why the 1898*Webster's*Collegiate dictionary labeled*red-skin*"often contemptuous," as Peter Sokolowski of Merriam-Webster has pointed out. But our lexicographical take on the word remained complicated.
Later volumes of*Webster's, in fact, dropped the derogatory label.*Webster's Second Unabridged*in 1934 and*Webster's Third Unabridged*in 1961 applied no label at all toredskin. Not that either was famous for its sensitivity:*Webster's Second*defined*Apache*as "nomads of warlike disposition and relatively low culture."Comment
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"With all due respect to our President Barack Obama, black folk don't need lectures on Black Entertainment Television. You go to Black Entertainment Television, Mr. President, respectfully, to lecture black folk and then you're wrong, respectfully, when you tell them that these things take time...stop telling black folk they['ve] got to wait, and that these things take time...Number two, Mr. President, respectfully, when you say we can't compare what's happening now to what happened fifty years ago, tell that to the parents of these kids who are being gunned down in america's streets. It is open season on black men, and it is in many ways as bad as it was fifty years ago. And finally, here's my point, why go to BET and give black folk a lecture but go to Stephen Colbert and tell jokes?" he stated.
Tavis SmileyComment
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