Go, Redskins (the name, not the team)
Go RedskinsWe take team owner Daniel M. Snyder at his word that he sees the nickname as an honor, and we appreciate how hard it is to abandon well-loved traditions. By the same token, it really is not up to the offender to characterize the nature of the offense. We can't imagine Mr. Snyder, or anyone else for that matter, sitting in a room of Native Americans and referring to them as Redskins. Think about the recent uproar caused by the use of "macaca," a word whose meaning was never really defined.
While the Redskins--and the rest of professional sports--have dug in their heels, a nationwide movement has seen hundreds of schools and minor league professional clubs get rid of Indian team names--with no adverse consequences. A local formula for success can be seen in the example set by Abe Pollin when, bothered by the high D.C. murder rate, he changed the name of his basketball team from Bullets to Wizards in 1997.
4 comments:
"The Washington Redinks", how about it?
Writerfella here --
And now I will tell you a secret: there is a reason why Natives both descry and decry the team names and mascots used for sports 'traditions.'
In the 70s, I still was on fair speaking terms with the SF writer and editor Harlan Ellison; in fact, he had become both my teacher and my friend. I spent a lot of time in The Ellison Wonderland house in Sherman Oaks, CA and in fact did a two-week stint housesitting there while Mr. Ellison was honeymooning in Europe.
One year during that period, he approached me hesitatingly and I was given to wonder as he is far from anyone prone to hesitations. He was writing a story he titled, "Knox," wherein a troubled and alienated young white man was about to join a neo-Nazi militia group. In order to prove worth and devotion to the group, the man was supposed to learn a long and detailed litany of racial slurs, ethnic aspersives, sexual slanders, and crudities about national origin. Thus, the 'knocks' in his story. He fairly well had filled out his laundry list of racial expletives, with one exception. He had only one or two for Native people. As I am Kiowa, had lived in Oklahoma and the south, and was a veteran of the US Air Force, he came to me to ask a question of some delicacy.
Um, er, uh, what are the names that white people and others call the Indians? No offense, now, but it's for my story.
I rather was amused and not upset whatsoever. So, I wrote down, "Indian, Injun, Dirty Injun, Dog-Eater, Gut-Eater, Squaw, Papoose, Redskin, Redstick (?), Prairie Niggers, Blanket Ass, and Brownie. He read it and said, "No, I mean the names that bite and slash and burn and tear. These are...stupid!" I shrugged and said, "That's all I've ever known or heard." He went away amazed and grumbling, and I was given to think, why are there no catastrophically hurtful terms for us on the part of 'the dominant society'? And then I knew: we had fought and we had lost. That was a far greater humiliation than any simple word could impart. And so I wrote a whole science fiction story wherein our conquerors know, or have been told, not to malign those who were 'people of the gods.' Endanger or kill them, yes; pronounce maledictions, no. And that was the reason there were so few words, in the story.
BUT -- the ones that do exist still can play that same kind of role. To myself, who knows in excess of a quarter million words, those are insignificant. To others, they can "bite and slash and burn and tear." I prefer to let the others fight that fight as I have my own battles to bear...
All Best
Russ Bates
'writerfella'
"Indian, Injun, Dirty Injun, Dog-Eater, Gut-Eater, Squaw, Papoose, Redskin, Redstick (?), Prairie Niggers, Blanket Ass, and Brownie." These names sound bad enough to me. They sound comparable to other ethnic slurs.
I mean..."prairie nigger" and "nigger"? How much closer can one insult be to another that everyone agrees is offensive?
If these insults don't faze Ellison, I wonder what he considers a real insult? I.e., one that bites and slashes and burns and tears.
How about this? Your version of "The City on the Edge of Forever" flunked the test, Harlan. Roddenberry's version was better.
Writerfella here --
During the time I spent in The Ellison Wonderland, I was hired to edit and 'update' Ellison's entire inventory of past stories, novellas, novels, teleplays, screenplays, and articles for THE UNIFORM HARLAN ELLISON SERIES from Pyramid Books. And then I finally got to read his original "The City On The Edge Of Forever" STAR TREK script. Aside from being overlong for a 54-minute episode by maybe three minutes, I found it literate and extremely well-textured for a television episode. I understood his grief at the loss of the crippled character, Trooper, simply because he saw himself in that character. When I read a teleplay or a screenplay, because of my training, I do not see words on a page; I see the people, and the places, and hear them speak, and see them move, and experience the stories, as though I were a television set or a movie screen. How well I experience such things, of course, depends on the skill of the other writer. Whatever the differences between Harlan Ellison and myself, I very much admire his control over his words and his characters and his stories. If anything, I aspire toward the same, reaching whatever levels I do achieve out of such aspirations. Man has gone to the moon, but where would he have gone, if he had no moon?
All Best
Russ Bates
'writerfella'
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