I don't feel they should feel the need to be extorted into doing anything. They should play football. I'm talking about society as a whole helping those in need, not going after a person or an organization to further an agenda.
"Agenda" is one of those words that can show garbled thinking, as if any "agenda" is an evil James Bond villain plot. It's a vague word. There are 'good' agendas and 'bad' agendas. Just saying "agenda" often comes out with spit-filled rage, but needs more to justify that.
I have been trying to think about this whole R e d s k i n (this is truly weird - without the spaces the word changes after posting to "beloved patriot"- I have never seen anything like it) thing and trying to figure it out. Maybe it is growing up with "sticks and stones will break my bones" thing, but it just does not hit home. Were I to meet an Indian and he said "Hey Pale-face", I would not feel offended. As long as he acting in a non threatening manner, I would probably get a laugh out of it.
How about a group of natives come and kill some of your family and neighbors, and kidnap the rest of you to move you to the most inhospitable bit of dirt in the desert they can find, and THEN call you a racial slur? Ha, ha? You are laughing, huh.
People whose ancestors oppressed others can look really clueless when they have some bizarre lack of understanding of the issues, as if calling 'a name' back and forth makes the two sides 'equal' historically.
Now, on the one hand, people are people. Black people, native people, white people today weren't slaves, weren't the subject of military slaughters, didn't do those things. There aren't 'ancestral' bank accounts that make the descendants of the victims 'owed' the same compensation as the victims, that makes the descendants of the perpetrators equally guilty as the perpetrators.
But it's also a lie not to recognize that centuries of discrimination had legacy effects that exist to this day, affecting the culture, causing racism, causing less wealth and opportunity for descendants TODAY directly from that history, even if the rules are now 'no discrimination'. The analogy is often made to having a race where some start further back, but it's 'equal' during the race.
But these bigger issues, which are not understood by many, aren't really the stakes of this team name issue, which you admit you don't get. More on that in a moment.
It seems pretty clear that when the organization changed its name from Braves to Redskins back in the 30's, it was not looking for new ways to piss people off. Doubtful that they thought much about it at all, either way. I know that toilet paper is now bathroom tissue and language changes, but I don't see anything inherently bad about the word.
Clearly though, a portion of society has seized upon words and labeled them as racist etc. I really don't know how long it will be before the Dallas Cowboys become the Dallas Cowpeople. It seems to be much more about getting people to bend to their will than true substantive change.
When did it switch from a team name to a racist caricature for you personally? Did you one day find it offensive? Did you learn it in school?. Is there some ever growing list of words that need to be banned. Are books ever to be included? How does this all work? How do you know which words get added to the list and when?
I think you're actually right in a good amount. That the motive for the name wasn't people saying, how can they be evil and hateful toward a group. That they didn't 'mean' the name that way.
It's something of a straw man to imply that people are claiming that IS what it was about, but let's agree, it wasn't. But think about it. Was the name meant to be 'respectful' to natives, either? Or did it somewhat treat the group of Native Americans, who had basically nothing to do with the team or sport or fans, almost like animals, where you have the "Dolphins" and "Tigers" and "Redskins"?
In fairness it should be pointed out, that Dallas doesn't have a bigoted, demeaning view of "Cowboys". Picking a name like that isn't just meant to demean necessarily. But given the view of native people historically, it seems a lot closer to the 'animal' treatment than the 'respectful cowboy' treatment.
The bottom line is that Natives, who were the victims of genocide, who haven't been treated very well historically - it seems like it took a century for the Custer story to develop two sides, for a group of slaughtering military of civilians who had the tables turned just once to be anything other than obviously the good guys - don't like being the mascot of a team they have nothing to do with.
And if there IS some respect for them, that that should be listened to. Think of it like blackface - having a white person run around acting like an idiot to amuse other white people isn't exactly respectful of black people. And having a 'beloved patriot' mascot essentially running around like an idiot, doing 'whoops' as non-Native fans are amused and entertained, is disrespectful.
Even if in BOTH cases 'they didn't mean any harm'. There comes a point you get a bit more of a clue, and say 'oh, that is jerky to them', and you stop doing it.
I'll tell you, white voice artists who did non-white voices didn't 'mean any harm'. But nearly all of them have recently come to understand, 'oh, that actually can be sort of offensive, and there's a real impact the role was denied to an artist of that race', and said they don't think it's right anymore, and won't do it.
That's a sort of cultural blindness. White people might not have 'meant any harm' when they did blackface comedy, but that's sort of the point, the disrespect they had for black people meant it was fine to do it because it didn't matter how black people thought of it, they were in their own little world, not a multi-cultural one, and 'we have a black maid' didn't count.
This is evolving. The non-white people have long recognized these issues; more white people are beginning to, not all. To the ones who don't, it's still a mystery, filled with straw men. "But they didn't pick the name Redskins for the team trying to be hateful". No, but there's more to the issue. And we're improving it.
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