Posted on 01/28/2003 12:56:17 PM PST by Right Wing Professor
Readers of the sports pages may notice a change in the newspaper's style beginning today: We have stopped using the nickname "Redskins" to refer to the professional football team of the nation's capital. When we're reporting on that team, we'll call it Washington.
We also have stopped printing logos for professional and college sports teams that use Native symbols -- ones that adopt imagery such as an arrowhead and ones that caricature Native culture. The Chief Wahoo logo of the Cleveland Indians, which we stopped using last summer, is an example of rank caricature. Instead, we'll use alternative logos that stay away from Native symbols.
Finally, we've decided to drop the stereotypical modifier "Fighting" when used with team nicknames such as Fighting Sioux or Fighting Illini.
We've made this decision out of respect for Native people. Plain and simple.
We will no longer use "Redskins" or "Skins" because it is a racial slur. It derives from an old, genocidal practice in this country of scalping Indians to earn a bounty. A bounty hunter could prove he had killed an Indian by turning in a scalp. The bloody scalps were called "redskins." I learned this from the Portland Press Herald in Maine, which banned "Redskins" from its sports pages in July 2000.
What about Native people who proudly wear "Redskins" caps and shirts? That's their choice, just as it is the choice of other sports fans to emblazon the name across their chests, some in the professed belief that it honors Native people.
I choose to credit the words of a Lakota man who recalled that he wore a "Redskins" T-shirt as a boy. He thought it was cool. When he was older, when he heard fans "woo-wooing," he saw things differently. "I felt like a cardboard cutout, a cartoon,'' he said.
Last year, the Native American Journalists Association called on news organizations to stop using sports mascots and nicknames that depict Native Americans by 2004.
I asked Sports Editor John Mabry and News Editor Jim Johnson, a NAJA member, to lead our inquiry on this topic. They researched the question, put together a packet of materials that included readers' views, and arranged for newsroom staffers to get together to talk it over. The two made a recommendation and I have accepted it.
Many sports mascots were adopted at a time in this country when Native people had no voice. Now they have a voice.
Some newspapers have already heeded that voice. The Minneapolis Star Tribune banned the use of all Native team names and mascots in 1994. The Oregonian, the St. Cloud (Minn.) Times, the Portland Press Herald and the Kansas City Star limit publication of Native mascots and images in varying ways.
Today, the Lincoln Journal Star joins their ranks. Out of respect for Native people. Pure and simple.
What, and honor a rich, old, white, warmongering slaveholder who got himself "selected" President by undemocratic means? You gotta be kidding me!
Agreed. The OED lists the first use of 'redskin' in 1699. While scalping went on before that - after all, the Indians themselves invented it - the first bounty, as far as I know, wasn't offered in English America until 1703, and the practice really didn't take off (so to speak) until the French and Indian War. The guy who first proposed the 'scalp' theory dates the word to 1800, which is way too late.
somebody else can take it from there.
LOL, but you left out the gays, and that's homophobic and insensitive.
I don't even want to think about what that would do to Green Bay's team name.
Surely these must be insults to Nordic Peoples, meat processing industry workers, and Americans of every extraction who found themselves in the American Old West. My wife's family hails from Vik Norway, from whence the Vikings get their name, several relatives have worked in the meat packing industry and I've got a Cowboy hat, boots and buckle, so I guess I should be triply offended? NOT!
That's great. And we Washingtonians will continue to call you "place where airplanes dump their chemical toilets."
Not only that, but the clown in question obviously isn't fit to be editor of a major paper, because she didn't verify this information with a second source, which in better days was a requirement for sound journalism.
"An Indian ... seized Henderson's daughter, 'sweet and pretty child of two, and beat her savagely over the head with a violin case, smashing her head horribly out of shape. Then he took her by her feet and dashed her brains out against the wheel of the wagon, spattering her mother with blood and brains. Another fiend took the nine-months-old boy, hacked off his limbs with a tomahawk, and threw pieces at the mother. Then they made a big fire and tossed featherbed, woman, and mangled children into the flames."
The Great Sioux Uprising, C.M. Oehler, Da Capo Press, 1997.
My kids all went to East. At least it's better than the Trojans. Too many jokes about the Trojan protection breaking down, busting through the Trojan defense...definitely offensive to Americans who practice safe sex.
WASHINGTON D.C. The Washington Bullets basketball team has announced that they are going to change their name because their image has become associated with urban violence. Henceforth they will be known simply as "The Bullets".
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