The Washington “Slurs”

Ray Halbritter, a representative for the Oneida Indian Nation, spoke after
meeting with NFL officials about Washington's nickname last month.

I originally wrote this as my final paper in a commentary/editorial writing course at the University of Maryland. I have altered it slightly to fit better in my blog’s layout but I am very proud of the perfect grade I received on this from my professor.

Discussion of this topic among national media has died down, possibly because the Redskins are doing so poorly (it seems like the name only ever becomes an issue in offseasons following postseason appearances), or maybe because the Mike Shanahan/RGIII drama takes a higher priority within sports media.

However, I still believe the Washington Redskins’ name is an important issue to discuss and to understand thoroughly. You may not agree with my stance on the name. You may agree but have different reasons. In either case, I hope that, if nothing else, you take away from this piece something you may not have known, or simply may not have thought about before.

Origins

“Is it racist?” A favorite “game” of comedian Daniel Tosh, he takes a video from the Internet that clearly has some subtle undertone of racism, or in some cases blatantly obvious racism, and finds some strange way of showing that it really isn’t racist after all.

It seems to many people that this is exactly what Washington Redskins owner Daniel Snyder has been doing since he once again found himself defending his team’s nickname last offseason.

The Boston Braves pro football franchise was born in 1932. In 1933, they moved from Braves Field, where the Boston Braves (now the Atlanta Braves) baseball franchise played, to legendary Fenway Park, where the Boston Red Sox still play today. That year, owner George Preston Marshall changed the team nickname to the Redskins.

The name was chosen partly as a connect with the baseball franchise his team shared a stadium with. It was also chosen, official stories say, to honor their new head coach, William Henry “Lone Star” Dietz, who promoted himself as a Native American. Granted, his honesty in that regard is questionable.

The team moved from Boston to Washington, D.C. in 1937 and has represented our nation’s capital ever since.

Native American Opinion

Throughout the years the name has come under fire. Certainly it made sense while the team was under the ownership of Marshall. He was widely regarded as a very racist man, understandably so since his was the last NFL team to integrate, doing so in 1962 with three black players, including Hall of Famer Bobby Mitchell.

But current owner Dan Snyder has already weathered two substantial attacks on the team’s name. The first came ten years ago. An Annenberg Public Policy Center poll, conducted by the University of Pennsylvania, concluded in September 2004 and showed that, with a sampling error of plus or minus two percentage points, 90 percent of Native Americans were unoffended by the team using “Redskins” as it’s nickname. The same survey showed that nine percent of Native Americans were offended and the remaining one percent preferred not to answer.

This had been enough to stave off further attacks on the name until the 2013 offseason began and the Oneida Indian Nation began fighting earnestly against the nickname’s use. Many sports writers now only call them “the team from Washington.” One friend of mine calls them the “Washington Slurs.”

The Nickname

Rick Reilly, an ESPN columnist, provides several examples of high schools that use “Redskins” as the nickname for their sports teams. One example is Wellpinit HS in Washington, where 91.2 percent of the students are Native American. Another is Kingston HS in Oklahoma, where 57.7 percent are Native American. They wear the name with pride.

So is the nickname unacceptable simply because people of a different race are wearing it? If that was the case, why does Kingston keep it as its nickname? Nearly half of the student body is of a race other than Native American. Even if the athletic teams are somehow represented mostly by Native Americans, it doesn’t stop the students of other races from referring to the teams as the “Redskins.”

The real issue here is offensiveness of the name itself. These high schools are not under the national spotlight the way the professional football team is for no less than 20 weeks of every year. So those offended, like the Oneida Indian Nation, would rather focus on a team that will get national recognition.

Offended by what, now?

An April 2013 survey by the Associated Press reported that 79 percent of respondents said the Redskins should not change their name, 11 percent said they should, and 10 percent had no opinion or preferred not to answer. This poll was not limited to Native Americans, but it certainly points to a possible change in public opinion in the past decade.

But is offense really enough reason to change a team’s name? Firstly, changing the team’s name does not eliminate the history. Many people will still think of them as the Redskins. It is what they have been for more than 80 years now. And when people think of the term “redskin,” they think of the professional football team, not of Native Americans in a demeaning way.

Besides, in this world we live in today, just about everything is offensive to someone. I know a few atheists who say they are offended by the nickname of the New Orleans Saints. I have read articles about why Notre Dame’s mascot is offensive because it depicts Irish people as violent.

So the question it all boils down to is this: how offensive is the term “redskins?” Oneida Indian Nation says that the term is just as offensive to Native Americans as the N-word is to African-Americans. But that word is universally considered out-of-bounds, with a few unfortunate exceptions, for anyone of another race, especially white people, to use.

If “redskins” is that offensive, why do high schools like Red Mesa in Arizona use it as their nickname? They have a student body that is 99.3 percent Native American and know that people of other races will have to use it to refer to their athletic teams.

One Group Does Not Speak For All

Perhaps the most important words that have shaped my opinion on this matter, the opinion that the team should not change it’s name, was a quote by recently retired Chief of the Fredericksburg-area Patawomeck Tribe, Robert Green, which was included in Daniel Snyder’s letter to all season ticket holders on October 9, 2013.

As cited in Snyder’s letter, Green said, “Frankly, the members of my tribe -- the vast majority -- don’t find it offensive. I’ve been a Redskins fan for years. And to be honest with you, I would be offended if they did change [the name, Redskins … This is] an attempt by somebody … to completely remove the Indian identity from anything and pretty soon … you have a wipeout in society of any reference to Indian people … You can’t rewrite history -- yes there were some awful bad things done to our people over time, but naming the Washington football team the Redskins, we don’t consider to be one of those bad things.”

It is only one man’s opinion, but when I hear it, when I read it, I don’t see how the word “redskins,” which some Native Americans consider to be a word that honors them, could be compared to the word that no African American would stand to let someone of another color use.

And so, while I do understand and acknowledge that some people are offended by Washington’s nickname, I also firmly believe that we cannot set a precedent such that we must go about changing anything and everything that people are offended by.