Redskins AgainI've never liked the team, and don't like many of the people associated with it over the years like Joe Theismann and John Riggins. But I do get tired of the constant controversy over the team name.
Today the Washington Post dedicates
part of its editorial page to allow one of their sports columnists to opine against the "Redskins".
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.Lotta fish in that barrel, let me get my gun. First of all, Chief Osceola, as the student on horseback is called, was designed with the
approval of the Seminole Tribe. The Seminoles want Florida State to continue to be identified with them, so if you change the name, you'd be disagreeing with the people who are supposedly maligned with the identification.
The "before some of our ancestors nearly exterminated them" is a bit gratuitous; most Indians died from European diseases for which they had no immunity, not European muskets. I'm sure that the vast majority of Indians were not warriors, just as the vast majority of Americans are not warriors.
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?Why would it be anti-Semitic to identify your team with orthodox Hasidics? Nobody names their teams after something nobody likes. If there were a team named the Rabbis, one would assume that whoever did the naming
liked Rabbis. If it's all about racism, how come no Southern team was ever called the Birmingham N*gg*rs?
He drags in the history of scalping (not that it's relevant except as another way to bash "our" ancestors), mentions a couple of players who have trouble with the name, then launches back into it:
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.Of course, it's all about feelings.
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.Okay, so Daniel Snyder doesn't get a vote in the matter. Well, then, let's put it to a vote of the people affected. We know that the Seminoles approve of their name being used; how about a
poll of Indians about the Redskins? Instead of some white guy making it his personal crusade (oops, sorry, Muslim friends!).
