What Most People Don’t Know About the Washington Redskins Team Name Change
By: Milton Black
Tags: Culture, Politics, Racism, Equality, Native American

What Most People Don’t Know About the Washington Redskins Team Name Change

Considering Contemporary Media Discourse, You’d Be Forgiven for Not Knowing This

MINNEAPOLIS — NOVEMBER 2: Protesters at the Change the Mascot Rally on November 2, 2014, in Minneapolis. The protesters believe the name Washington Redskins is offensive to Native Americans. Image: Shutterstock

In July of 2020, a spontaneous event that most people didn’t see coming took place when the NFL football team, the Washington Redskins, announced they would change their name to something else after approximately two decades of pressure coming from a small minority of the US population. The history of the controversy is a bit dubious and the reason that extreme minority was so passionate about the team changing its name is even stranger. Like dominoes falling in succession, just days after the Supreme Court granted the Muscogee Nation (Creek Native Americans) a significant bulk of land in Oklahoma, suddenly, without warning, the team itself announced the coming name change without much external prompting. The land was rightfully theirs, it’s a beautiful thing to see America giving it back and the team promising to change its name was just the icing on the cake.

While the issue was on the back burner for a lot of people, myself included, in the face of Black Lives Matter protests, police brutality, and Trump spewing discombobulated sentences on a daily basis and passing it off as leadership. It’s not. You’d be forgiven if you haven’t been keeping tabs on such a non-violent issue.

Nonetheless, it’s something I believed should happen for several years now and it hovered in the backdrop as one of those issues of low priority — an offensive team name just isn’t on the radar when unarmed black people are being killed by the police in the streets and broadcasted live for the world to see.

Finally, the moment many of us had been waiting for came and the team promised us the change that we desired. But was this really a victory? Did we jump the gun and apply pressure unduly? I know what you’re thinking, you’re probably thinking that the team name is changed and, like me, think that while some right-wing voices will decry the change as blasphemy, complaining loudly that their time-honored traditions — especially football — are now being taken over by political argument, if it spares the feelings of hurt Native Americans, it’s all for the better. Really, Native Americans were treated horribly by America in their past, and having racist team names that White Americans gave Native Americans as a way to make fun of them in the olden days just isn’t a nice thing to do.

You probably also believe that those Native Americans are also made really uncomfortable by seeing the mascots, the logos, the team apparel, and anything with the Redskins insignias on them. And just like me, you’d be dead wrong. There is a lot that we weren’t told in the news and by the media leading up to the team name change. Now here’s where things get weird…

Most Native Americans Didn’t Want the Team Name Changed

I chose the photo at the top of this story for a reason and that reason is that the majority of people who wanted the team name changed were white people. That’s right, several polls have confirmed that only an extreme minority of Native Americans actually wanted the team name changed. Hundreds and even thousands of Native Americans have been polled over time and the answer usually comes back the same, that a marginal 9% or 10% wanted the team name changed.

Many Native Americans reported that they feel the team name is uplifting and denotes power and strength. In a poll from Washington Post, 500 Native Americans were asked to choose a word that they identified with the term redskins, and the number one word chosen was proud. The second most common was, “indifferent,” followed by, “annoyed,” “content,” “satisfied,” and, “disappointed.”

This all came as a massive surprise to me, someone who just assumed that Native Americans were universally behind the team name change, finding it offensive.

Then it sank in. Was I being racist? Did I just put all of those Native American people into a box and assume that they had to be offended, that they had to be hurt every single time they heard the term Redskin because they’re Native Americans? I mean, after all, it’s an old derogatory label that was issued to them by the very white people that conquered them, right? And I was wrong again.

The Term Wasn’t Originally Derogatory

Astonishingly, I did a bit of research, dug out the old etymology, and even good ole’ fashion Wikipedia had some enlightening things to say about the issue. I was operating under the assumption that White Americans always cared about race as much as the media claims we do today, and that assumption was wrong. For most of America’s history, race wasn’t the fundamental divisive factor, religion was. Until the late 19th-century, African slaves weren’t so much black as pagans. The justification for slavery wasn’t so much based on race but religion as the Europeans who settled America typically divided the world into two groups, Christian and pagan.

It was the Native Americans who made such designations and even the origins of the word “redskin” is Native American. Dating all the way back to the pre-Columbian era, an era that began in 7,000 BCE, there’s evidence of Native Americans referring to themselves as “red” in regard to complexion. The word was first translated into French in the 18th-century, from the Fox meeshkwinameshkaata which literally translates to, “One having red skin,” meaning it wasn’t invented by those who would later end up carrying out atrocities on the Native American nations a century later. The term redskin was invented by Native Americans as a way to self-identify and separate themselves from others. For those interested, there’s a lot of material available here on the subject, a subject which wasn’t as simple as I initially thought it would be.

Embrace the Change

But me? I’m okay with it. It’s concerning that mostly white people were behind this change, like myself, were low-key racist about it, as we just jumped to the conclusion that Native Americans were soft, vulnerable, weak, and couldn’t help but shy away from the team’s logo and become completely depressed and hurt by it. We shouldn’t assume how anyone feels about something automatically, we should find out the facts first. To do otherwise is to be low-key kind of racist, if I may.

But honestly, I love seeing the change of products, I love the Redskins and I’m cool with seeing them change to a new team. I’ve been through enough changes in the Rams and Raiders to know that teams aren’t forever. I feel like some of the pushback isn’t even racism but just ole’ fashion people not liking change. It’s sad that the Boeing 747 is going to be retired as a plane for consumer travel and that will be the end of that era.

I think what a lot of people bemoan when things like this happen is the loss of familiarity, of nostalgia, and the pain of coming to grips with the fact that nothing in this life is permanent. They trivialize this aspect of the pain they’re experiencing because it’s unflattering, and it admits of weakness. Conversely, they play up the fact that they’re tired of “identity politics” and think that it’s just angry, thoughtless mobs tearing away the shreds of the foundations of their personal history — the experiences they’ve had before that have shaped them.

I’ve had a whole lot of joyful moments watching the Redskins play. They’ve been one of my favorite teams since I was a kid, but I’ll be glad to see them change and grow into something new. I ask those who feel hurt by these changes, Aunt Jemima, the Washington Redskins, etc., are your attachments to such things really not just your own version of an identity? Is your being bothered by this change not just the fact that you feel like you’re losing a little part of yourself? I think it is. I feel the ache, too, for a moment, when it hits me that something from my childhood will soon be gone. It reminds me that I’m getting older. It reminds me that a new generation will come along and someday take my place as I age and grow into a more serene, isolated existence. It’s okay to get older. It’s okay to let things change and take their own courses. All is in flux, friends.

*Footnote: while I’m not upset about the team name change, I think it’s very alarming how much our media is manufacturing controversy for clicks and political points. They seem to generate outrage and even outright hatred in order to move the political compass in their own direction and this is something we should all be very worried about.