Silly fight over a football team’s name exposes ethnical oversensitivity

Look. You’d probably be quite hard-pressed to find anyone who’s a stauncher opponent of racism than I am. I believe it is utmostly foul, injurious, unjust, silly, and really, just plain wrong – ie. all the hallmarks of any form of bigotry – to think less of someone just because they happen to look a bit different than you do. I also think that anyone who engages in racism, or who honestly believes that they are superior to others because their skin happens to have less (or more) melanin than other ethnicities’, isn’t somebody worth talking to (to say the least).

Yet, even with my keen leanings for social justice and equality between ethnicities, this story is one that strikes me as being nothing more than just silly. You know about the football team named the Washington Redskins, around since the ’30s (though registered in the late ’60s), right? Well, they’re being sued by a group of Native Americans, who claim that the team’s name is “disparaging” and even downright “racist”.

"It is the worst thing in the English language you can be called if you are a native person," said Suzan Shown Harjo, a Native American writer and public policy advocate who is the lead plaintiff in one of the most compelling lawsuits in sports history.

Seventeen years after challenging the Washington Redskins trademark, Harjo and six others have renewed their fight, petitioning the Supreme Court to examine a lower-court ruling that denied their challenge on a technicality.

Here’s why their “fight” is silly and is (hopefully) doomed to fail. It’s all in the intent. If the name was chosen with the specific intent to be disparaging, or to possess a racist connotation – ie. if it was actually meant to be insulting to American Indians – then yes, I would fully support any movement to remove such a name from a team (or anywhere else). But this is not the case. Here, what we have is a team name that’s not intended to cause any resentment or anger amongst the people whom the name allures to. It’s just a word used to identify a football team (and perhaps, to a lesser extent, to represent their chosen team colors). Claiming that the name is meant to insult others is patently absurd.

Put it this way: the team could be called the Washington Negroes or Niggers (whatever the difference is). Or, it could be named the Washington Nazis. Or the Washington al-Qaeda-lovers. Yes, these particular names would understandably be flagrantly inappropriate in pragmatical terms, but in the essence of it all, what it boils down to is if the name itself is actually calling the team, or anyone else, “niggers”, “Nazis” or al-Qaeda supporters, or any other insults under the sun. What matters is not what the name itself means, but what the reason for its use is.

All this story does, rather than shed light on the supposed inappropriateness or insulting qualities of a football team’s name, is rather reveal latent insecurities and the general tendency for people to be complete sissies at the slightest prod of a jesting or otherwise uninsulting finger. When the name of a football team is enough to set your moral righteousness off, you should take that as a sign that you may have deeper issues to deal with, than the name of something as irrelevent as a team in organized sports.

Just a little thought/rant.

Technorati tags: Washington Redskins · redskins · Native Americans · American Indians · Indians · football · racism · silliness