[For each of the
last few years, I’ve used Super
Bowl week to AmericanStudy some
football and/or sports
topics. This week, I’ll focus on five football debates I haven’t already
covered in those series, leading up to a special post on a few Super Bowl L
storylines!]
On what’s not
complicated, and what is, about name and mascot debates.
I grew up a die-hard
Washington Redskins fan (that 35-point 2nd Quarter
in the 1987 Super Bowl remains one of my favorite sports memories of all
time, and not just because we were watching with a family friend who had
already started gloating about his Broncos), and my lifelong best friend Steve
remains such a fan (Dan
Snyder has long since pushed me away). So I’d be the first admit that the
defenses of the team’s name aren’t hard to understand: when you’re a fan of a
team, particularly the kind of die-hard fan whose identity has been caught up
with that team for years and years (if not decades and decades), the thought of
changing any fundamental aspect of that team’s identity is a pretty unnerving
one. It’s not an exact analogy by any means, but all those fans
who swore off the Brooklyn Dodgers when they moved West to Los Angeles were
participating in a similar kind of angry reaction to change, and demonstrating
the power of fan passion even when (as in the Redskins case) it’s entirely divorced
from the rest of reality.
Because let’s
face it, the overwhelming arguments for changing the team’s name aren’t the
slightest bit complicated either. I don’t care how many faux-Native
Americans Snyder trots out to support his cause, the simple truth is that
the word “Redskins” is a
longstanding, historical, undebated racial slur, a derogatory term for a community of fellow Americans.
That’d be more than enough to merit a change on its own terms (as many
commentators have argued, we would never permit a team to be known as the “Spics”
or “Chinks” here in 21st century America), but the team’s history
adds another layer of racism into the mix: the founding owner George
Preston Marshall was himself an inveterate racist, and almost certainly
chose the name as part of that
worldview and perspective. However tough it might be for die-hard Redskins
fans to get used to a new name, those emotions and responses can’t possibly
measure up to how destructive it is (not just for Native Americans, but for all
of us) to have a professional sports franchise bear such a hateful name and
history.
Far more
complicated, at least from my admittedly removed vantage point, is the question
of all the other franchises that bear less overtly racist or negative Native
American names. In the NFL alone we’ve got the Kansas City Chiefs; in baseball
we’ve got the Cleveland Indians (and their most definitely overtly
racist logo/mascot, which needs to be changed just as quickly as does the
Redskins name) and the Atlanta Braves (my other childhood and lifelong favorite
team; hmm, I think I’ve got something else to bring to my
AmericanStudiesTherapist); in hockey the Chicago Blackhawks; and then there are
all
those college and high school teams. I’m not in any way suggesting that
changing the Redskins name would have to be a slippery slope to debating all
these other names as well—different situations can and should produce different
responses, and in any case the possibility of distinct future debates is in no
way an argument in a present one. But at the same time, it seems clear to me
that our national tendency to name teams after Native Americans reflects, at
the very least, our collective narratives of those cultures and communities as a
vanished part of our past, rather than a very much alive and vital part of
our present and future. So it’s probably long past time we considered what all
these names have to tell us, and where we go from there.
Next debate
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think?
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