quote:

Originally posted by mbinky:
The call for name change WILL NOT stop at the Redskins. It's just the opening salvo. So my answer would be a resounding "NO"!

That being said, the teams apparent cow towing to the mob of Karens calling for this leads me to believe this would be a good new name for them:

Great idea, you just need to change the likeness of that Karen to this one and you’re all set up.

https://youtu.be/b9oJtSpOQhY

I would like all teams in the nfl to be named solely by the city in which they headquarter, just like football teams in England. All cities with more than one team get the oldest team, and the others go to another city. The conferences keep equal numbers of teams.

VTHoky doesn’t have to worry because no ancestors of the Hokies have come forward to announce that they have been insulted by the name. Good going, VT!

The whole NFL and NBA BS happening right now is sad.

But how many conservatives will stop watching and stop buying tickets and merch? The redskins only started considering a name change when corporate sponsors threatened their revenue....Well, the NFL is a lot more dependent on its fans than on its corporate sponsors.

This country is under attack, and we can't even sacrifice our ritual of watching ungrateful multi-millionaires tossing a ball around. I don't know how we can ever expect to win this country back if we can't even make a small stand against an industry that depends on us for its success but is now crapping on us regularly.

quote:

Originally posted by bendable:
Of all the petty shit to fret, bicker and rant over,
this has got to be the absolute limit.

The drunks can beat their wives ,regardless of what the teams are named.

The gamblers don't give a kick in the nuts about what names are on the scoreboard.

If all a guy has to do is cry about team names,
It might very well be time to consider a 72 hour self imposed visit to the local mental facility

You know bendable, something has changed in you.

For years you have been that loveable but perpetually confused member that found a way to misspell 4 letter words and couldn't string together a coherent thought or question...but lately you've become that perpetually confused member who still misspells 4 letter words while posting still-incoherent thoughts and questions...but you've added obnoxious to your repertoire.

Since you have recently adopted the habit of pinning on your junior G-man badge and cruising the forum looking to call out others, maybe you could take a moment to re-read this thread:

Curb those negative waves, Man.

You should remember this thread, as you posted several times in it, including the last post in it.

Pay attention to the intent, the purpose of that thread, re-read the memes and comments you posted in that thread.

Why don't you take a moment to explain to the members participating in this thread how what you posted here comports with the intent of the "negative waves" thread and what you posted there.

I realize that this thread/ poll is not specific to a particular sport or team, but as the Redskins are, once again, in the news I'm going to focus these next few posts on them.

As a former NFL football watcher, and perhaps even a tiny bit of a Redskin fan from an earlier era, it only just occurred to me that some may not know the history of the team, the history of the name and the history of the logo.

There are no shortage of articles and opinion pieces on why the team name is racist and should be changed so I'm not going to focus on those.

Instead, here are several sources using what facts are known, to show why, when the team name was chosen, it was not racist.

I consider this piece to be one of the more balanced and well thought out explanations:

===========

[note: comments can read at the linked website]

WHY DID THE WASHINGTON REDSKINS CHOOSE THE NAME “REDSKINS” IN THE FIRST PLACE, RATHER THAN SOME OTHER NATIVE AMERICAN NAME?

By: J. Gordon Hylton
June 3, 2014

In a recently “discovered” Associated Press story of July 5, 1933, owner George Preston Marshall of the National Football League’s Boston franchise is quoted as saying that he was changing the team’s name from “Braves” to “Redskins” to avoid confusion with Boston’s baseball Braves. This bit of evidence has been proclaimed to disprove the contemporary Washington Redskins’ claim that the name change was to honor the team’s newly appointed Indian coach, William Lone Star Dietz.

However, that is not necessarily the case. All the quote really establishes is that Marshall felt he had to change the team’s name before the 1933 season began; it does not necessarily explain why he chose the name “Redskins” as the replacement name. The name change was apparently necessary because Marshall had entered into an agreement for his team to play in Fenway Park in 1933, rather than in Braves Park, as it had done in 1932.

The story of how the team came to choose the name “Redskins” is a complicated one and for which the evidence is somewhat sketchy.

One thing that is clear is that several months before July 1933, Marshall had decided that he was going to bring “Indian football” back to the National Football League. Indian football was a wide open brand of early twentieth century football, usually played by Native American teams, that featured lots of passing and trick plays. It was most strongly associated with the college teams fielded by the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania between 1893 and 1917, and during the 1920’s with the Haskell Indian Institute teams from Lawrence, Kansas. For two years, 1922 and 1923, the National Football League had also featured the Oorang Indians, an all-Native American team based in Larue, Ohio, that featured player-coach Jim Thorpe.

It is likely that the availability of Coach Deitz, a well-known figure in college football who had been a teammate of Thorpe at the Carlisle Indian School and had taken teams to two Rose Bowl games, figured into this decision. At the time of his hiring by Marshall, Dietz was the coach at the Haskell Indian Institute and was famous for the “trick” plays and unconventional formations deployed by his teams. While it is true that Marshall had long been fascinated by certain aspects of Native American history, it seems likely that the availability of Dietz, combined with the resignation of previous Head Coach Lud Wray, led him to embrace the idea of reviving Indian football when he did.

Although Marshall’s team had begun play in the NFL as the Boston Braves in 1932, little effort was made that first year to exploit the Native American connection. Unlike the Boston Braves baseball team, which was the first American sports team to wear an Indian insignia on its uniforms, the 1932 football Braves deployed no such imagery. In 1933, in contrast, Marshall planned to fully exploit the Native American connection. An Indian head symbol was adopted as the team’s logo and placed on the front of the players’ jerseys, and Marshall encouraged Dietz to recruit some Indian players for the team. (At least six Native Americans, most of whom had played for Dietz at Haskell, had tryouts with the team, and four made the final roster.)

In marketing the team before the 1933 season, Marshall had Dietz and some of the Indian players photographed in full Native American regalia, and during the first home game of the 1933 season the players, Indian and non-Indian alike, were required to wear war paint on their faces. Dietz stalking the sidelines wearing his Sioux headdress was also a regular sight at the team’s games, and the team’s new playbook had a clear Indian football slant. (Whether Dietz’s plays would work in the NFL was a different question.)

The original plan was to play in 1933, as in 1932, under the name Boston Braves, but with a much greater “Indian” emphasis. The decision to relocate to Fenway Park necessitated giving up the name Braves, but Marshall’s commitment to Indian football required that the team’s new name also refer in some way to Native Americans.

But why did Marshall choose “Redskins,” rather than some other name that would reflect the team’s inspiration? Why not “Indians,” or “Warriors,” or “Chiefs”?

In the American sporting landscape of 1933, there were only a handful of examples of Native American names attached to sports teams. For example, during the 1932 and 1933 seasons, there were 14 teams in Major and Minor Baseball that had Native American nicknames. “Indians” was by far the most popular, paired with the city name of teams in Cleveland, Indianapolis, Seattle (also called the Rainiers), Oklahoma City, San Antonio, and Quincy, Illinois, and Keokuk, Iowa.

In addition, three teams used the name “Chiefs” (located in Worcester, Massachusetts, Ft. Wayne, Indiana, and Muskogee, Oklahoma); two used “Braves” (Boston and Pueblo, Colorado); and the Mobile, Alabama team in the short-lived Southeastern League was called the “Red Warriors.” One team, the Memphis “Chickasaws” of the Southern Association, used a tribal name associated with its region. In college football, there were several teams with Native American names, but most, like Stanford, Dartmouth, and William and Mary used “Indians.” On the other hand, there were two schools–the University of Utah and Miami University of Ohio–that used “Redskins” as their nicknames.

Consequently, if he wanted to use a Native American team name that was somewhat familiar, Marshall’s options were limited. “Braves” was out, of course, and there was an unwritten rule in the National Football League in that era that nicknames used by major league baseball teams were reserved for the NFL teams that played in the same city. (“Braves” had been reserved for the Boston team in 1932 under this same principle.) As a result, “Indians” was also not available to Marshall. Teams with the name Cleveland Indians had played in the NFL in 1921, 1923, and 1931, and in 1933, it probably seemed likely that a new Cleveland Indians team would enter the league at some point in the future.

For all practical purposes, the list of familiar Native American team names that was available was limited to “Warriors,” “Chiefs,” and “Redskins,” unless Marshall chose to adopt a tribal name, as the baseball team the Memphis Chickasaws had done. Unfortunately, none of the tribal names associated with Boston or eastern Massachusetts—Wampanoag, Massachusett, Nauset, Nantucket, Pennacook, Pokanoket, or Pocasset—were particularly evocative, or recognizable, or even pronounceable.

The decision to choose “Redskins” may have been based, as I have argued earlier, on the phonic similarities between “Redskins” and “Red Sox,” the other team using Fenway Park in 1933. Moreover, at that time there was a certain novelty to the name “Redskins.” Although their meaning was different, the two names sounded alike, and it would be easy for fans to link the two names together. Moreover, there was an element of novelty to the name. Although the term “Redskins” was familiar to sports fans–sportswriters had regularly used “Redskins” as a synonym for “Indians” or “Braves” for years when writing about the baseball teams in Cleveland and Boston, or the football team in Cleveland–no team in the NFL had ever been officially called the “Redskins.”

Nor had there ever been a Redskins team in Major League Baseball. In fact, only once had a minor league baseball team used the name “Redskins.” That team, based in Muscogee [Muskogee], Oklahoma, played under the name “Redskins” in the Oklahoma, Arkansas, Kansas League in 1907, the Oklahoma-Kansas League in 1908, and the Western Association in 1911. In an era where team nicknames were quite fluid, the Muscogee team, which existed from 1905 to 1911, also played under the names “Reds” (1905); “Indians” (1906); and “Navigators” (1910-11).

While the name “Redskins” was used by at least two college teams in 1933, neither was a national powerhouse, so when the New England sporting public was presented with the new name in 1933, it probably sounded new and distinctive, but at the same time, not unfamiliar.

In addition, there are two other factors that may have influenced Marshall’s choice of “Redskins.”

One relates to the 1929 movie, Redskin, which, while not particularly well remembered today, contained one of the most sympathetic portrayals of Native Americans in the silent film era and is well-known to film historians. Redskin is the story of a young Navaho male named Wing Foot who unwillingly attends a government-operated Indian boarding school. After a period of adjustment, he does well at the school and later wins a scholarship to a prestigious eastern college where he wins great honor as a student and as an athlete. Nevertheless, his accomplishments are undercut when Wing Foot eventually discovers that he will eventually denied entry into white society because of his race. Moreover, when he returns to the Navajo as an educated man, he is rejected because of his white ways. Wing Foot finds himself trapped between the two cultures, no longer fitting into either one.

The movie was highly praised at the time for its sensitive portrayal of the plight of the Native American, and in 1930, the white actor Richard Dix, who had played Wing Foot in the film, was made an honorary member of the Kaw Indian tribe based on his supposedly realistic portrayal of a Native American in the film. The ruggedly handsome Dix had been a star athlete in his youth and in some accounts had briefly played football at the University of Minnesota. In the 1920’s he seemed to specialize in sports-related movies, portraying football and baseball players, amateur and professional boxers, auto racers, and aviators in a variety of films. Prior to his performance in Redskin, he also had won plaudits for his portrayal of a Native American character in the equally well-regarded 1925 film, The Vanishing American.

While it is hard to know precisely what Marshall thought of the film, he was certainly aware of it, given his personal connections to Dix and to Louise Brooks, who was also involved in the making of the film. Marshall had been an acquaintance of Dix (then known as Ernest “Pete” Brimmer), when the two men were young actors affiliated with the Morosco Theater in New York in the late 1910’s. Although his own career as a an actor ended when he took over the family laundry business following his father’s unexpected death in 1918, he remained fascinated with Broadway and Hollywood, and he regularly socialized with show business people and eventually married silent film star Corrine Griffith. In this context, he seems likely to have followed Dix’s film career, particularly his roles in movies involving sports, which was also a long standing passion of Marshall.

Moreover, actress Louise Brooks, with whom Marshall had a highly publicized love affair in the late 1920’s, was originally cast in Redskin as Corn Flower, Wing Foot’s Pueblo Indian love interest. Since this casting occurred during the Marshall-Brooks relationship, Marshall surely was aware of the movie, even before it went into production. (Brooks was eventually pulled from the cast so that she could star with William Powell and Jean Arthur in her first talking role in The Canary Murder Case, so she does not actually appear in Redskin.)

Given these connections, one possibility is that the name “Redskins” appealed to Marshall because it allowed him to envision a team of Richard Dix-like athletes—even to the point of most of them being white men portraying Native Americans. Another possibility is that Marshall was sensitive enough to see a connection between the character of Wing Foot in Redskin and Coach Dietz and the Indian players to be recruited for the team, all of whom, like Wing Foot, had presumably have been “Americanized” by Indian schools and team sports like football.

It is also possible that the hiring of Lone Star Dietz did affect Marshall’s decision to call the team “Redskins.” It is hard to track linguistic changes with precision, but over the course of the Twentieth Century, the meaning of the term “Redskin” shifted from a generic synonym for “Indian” or “Native American,” to a term that suggested a particular type of Indian—i.e., a war-like Plains Indian from the 1870’s or 1880’s. This, of course, was the time and place in which the vast majority of American western novels and movies of the mid-Twentieth Century were set. The continued usage of the term ”Redskins” in western movies and western fiction, and later in western television shows, combined with the gradual disappearance of the term from general usage, led to a change in meaning of word for many Americans. However, the extent to which this shift in meaning had occurred by 1933, and to what extent it had occurred with George Preston Marshall by that year, is hard to gauge.

However, it may be that the presence of Lone Star Dietz, who claimed to be a member of the Sioux Tribe, did affect Marshall’s thinking. William Dietz was one of the great imposters in American sports history. Although it is possible that his birth mother was Native-American (possibly an Ojibwa), he was raised by two German-American parents in Rice Lake, Wisconsin, and did not begin to present himself to the world as a Native American until he was nearly 20 years old. Often claiming to be a half-breed child of a Sioux woman and a German-American engineer who had grown up on an Indian reservation in South Dakota with the name Lone Star, Dietz was extraordinarily successful in convincing Native Americans that he was one of them.

Also a gifted artist who focused on Native American subjects, Dietz managed to talk his way into the Carlisle Indian School where he was a student and an instructor, as well as a star lineman on the football team. His first wife, Angel Decora, a noted Indian artist, believed he was a Native American, as did all of his Carlisle teammates and the players, Indian and non-Indian, that he coached at Washington State, the Mare Island Marine Base, Purdue, Wyoming, Louisiana Tech, and Haskell. Although the accuracy of his heritage claims was occasionally challenged, Dietz lived his entirely adult life successfully holding himself out to be Native American.

In retrospect, it is easy to disparage both Marshall and Dietz as frauds. Both inhabited personas of their own design. However, at the time of Dietz’s hiring, Marshall clearly believed that his new coach was a Sioux Indian. And, thanks to the legacy of the Dakota War of 1862, Custer’s Last Stand at the Battle of the Little Big Horn, Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull, and Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, no tribe, except possibly the Apaches of the Southwest, better exemplified the warlike Native Americans of western movies who were increasingly associated with the term “Redskins” (and who were often depicted as members of the Sioux Tribe).

It is possible, then, that Marshall chose to rename his team “Redskins” because he thought that the nickname was particularly appropriate for a team coached by an actual Sioux Indian. If that is what happened, then it may be true that the name was actual chosen to “honor” Lone Star Dietz.

We will never know for certain exactly why George Preston Marshall chose the name “Redskins” in the summer of 1933. As a general rule, Marshall was usually closed-mouth about his motivations, and he left little in the way of letters or diaries that might reveal his real thoughts. Most likely his decision to select the “Redskins” name was a result of all of the factors discussed above.

Whatever the explanation for the selection of “Redskins,” the significance of the change has probably been exaggerated, thanks to the shift in meaning that has occurred in regard to the word “Redskins” since 1933, and especially since the 1970’s, during which time the word “Redskin” has become widely perceived to be an ethnic slur, something that was not originally the case.

The Associated Press story regarding the name change mentioned above also ran in the Salt Lake City Tribune on July 6, 1933. That newspaper, which closely covered the University of Utah Redskins during the football season, ran the story under the title, “Boston Pro Grid Team Alters Name.” Not “changes” name, but merely “alters” name. In 1933, at least, the difference between “Braves” and “Redskins” seemed pretty insignificant to most American sports fans.

The legitimacy of non-Native Americans using Native American signifiers as sports team nicknames is an important part of the ongoing discussion concerning the proper use of racially-oriented vocabulary in American culture. Whether the use of Indian nicknames by non-Indian sports teams represents the improper appropriation of someone else’s cultural property, or whether it is a permissible use of materials properly in the public domain, is an important issue about which well-meaning people clearly disagree. However, the continued squabbling over the name “Redskins,” usually with very little attention to the complex history of the name, contributes very little to this important debate.

[note: comments can be read at the linked website]

===============

The Washington Redskins shouldn't change their name

Dan Ford | The Breeze
Dan Ford
Sep 13, 2017

Over the past few years, the debate regarding the potentially negative connotation of the Washington Redskins’ team name has gained substantial attention. With the start of a new NFL season, there will be those among commentators and sports analysts, as well as common fans of the sport, who’ll wholly refuse to use the team’s name, hoping not to offend the Native American community, while persistently demanding that the football team alter its name and mascot.

Yet, it seems to me as if those calling for the team to change its name are doing so prematurely. Statistics on the subject are providing overwhelming evidence that the offense produced by the name isn’t nearly as powerful as it’s believed to be by so many.

Admittedly, I’m indeed a Redskins fan — no matter how painful being one happens to be — yet, I’ll put away my team-centered bias in crafting this article. Rather, I’ll defend my opinion using meaningful facts, beginning with an important historical summation of the team’s name and of the origins of the word “redskin.”

Although many have come to understand the origin of the Redskins’ name as being innocent, it bears repeating. Founded in 1932 in the city of Boston, the football team was rather oddly named after one of the city’s baseball teams — the Boston Braves — with the team name “Braves,” referencing the Native American population. In an effort to end the confusion created by having two of the city’s major sports teams operate under the same name, team owner George Preston Marshall decided after just one season to alter the team’s name. The chosen name was Boston Redskins until 1937, when the franchise moved to our nation’s capital, becoming the Washington Redskins.

It’s therefore evident that there was no ill will in naming the franchise the Redskins.

In order to provide this debate with the fairness it deserves, it should be mentioned that in disagreement with rather common claims by those who support the team retaining its name — including the official claims of the Washington Redskins franchise and of its current owner, Daniel Snyder — there’s in fact no proof that Marshall chose to name the team Redskins with any desire of honoring Native Americans as a general group. Nor is there proof of Marshall’s desire to honor the team’s Native American head coach at the time, Lone Star Dietz. Rather, Marshall simply sought a near-synonym to the original team name, hoping to maintain the team’s reference to the Native American population while ending the confusion caused by being named identically to one of the city’s baseball teams.

What’s obvious, however, is that this name wasn’t objected to by the team’s Native American head coach nor by any local Native American tribes.

Perhaps surprising to those who believe the word redskin to be derogatory, the outcry against the team’s name was virtually nonexistent when the team rebranded itself in 1933. The reason for this can be understood when studying the history of the word and realizing that by the third decade of the 1900s, its publically accepted definition had largely returned to the non-derogatory meaning with which it was born.

A common mistake made by people decrying the use of the team’s name is the comparison of redskin to the N-word. Yet, unlike the N-word, which has a history that’s nearly entirely of a derogatory nature, the word redskin wasn’t created to be a racial epithet, but rather a mere label of the Native American people. The earliest reference to the word being commonly used in speech came in the 1700s, with Native Americans often referring to European colonists as “whiteskins” and the Europeans innocently referring back to the Native Americans as, among other things, redskins. No offense was harbored by either side.

However, despite this innocent origin, it’s important to realize that by the 1810s and certainly by the time of Andrew Jackson’s administration in the late 1820s and through the majority of the 1830s, the word began to hold a negative, derogatory connotation. During this time, grave destruction was inflicted upon the Native American population during their forced exodus from the eastern states of the U.S. by Jackson’s heartless policies creating the infamous Trail of Tears. In concert with these physical abuses, the word was used in an attempt to inflict verbal abuse upon the already aching Native American populations. However, again in contrast to the history of the N-word, by the end of the 1800s, the word had largely lost its negative connotation in society, and in fact wasn’t commonly used at all.

Given all of this, however, the checkered history of the word redskin bears witness to the important reality that the definition of words can indeed change over time — sometimes dramatically so — making the contemporary definition of the word and the public’s opinion to it the most important aspect of this debate.

Numerous polls have provided insight into the fact that today’s Native Americans overwhelmingly view the team’s use of the word as being innocent and not in need of removal. A 2004 Annenberg Public Policy Center poll found that nine in 10 Native Americans didn’t want the team to alter its name. Yet, the most noteworthy poll of late is one conducted by the Washington Post, in which the results — provided to the public in 2016 — are eerily similar to those of previous polls, showing that nine out of 10 Native American respondents claimed to not be offended by the team’s name, with nine percent claiming no offense to the name and one percent claiming indifference.

Perhaps the results of these polls make it less surprising to realize that several majority Native-American-populated high schools use the name redskins to represent their sports teams, including the Wellpinit High School Redskins, which are located in the state of Washington and heavily attended by children of the Spokane Tribe of Indians. So, too should it be of little surprise that the Redskins of Red Mesa High School located in Arizona share the name of the Washington Redskins, despite being composed nearly entirely of children from the Navajo Nation, which itself tends to be composed of outspoken supporters of the Washington Redskins franchise retaining its team name.

If there’s a time when definitive proof can be provided as evidence that a majority of Native Americans find the name to be offensive and in need of change, then the Washington Redskins franchise should alter its name accordingly.

As of now, however, the facts speak in favor of the team retaining its name.

Dan Ford is a senior international affairs and international business double major. Contact Dan at forddm@dukes.jmu.edu.

[note: you can both read comments and see the Redskin team logos used, throughout the team history at this website]

==============

Washington Redskins Primary Logo

The Redskins primary logo used today was first designed in 1971 in close consultation with Native American leaders. Among those who unanimously approved and voiced praise for the logo was Walter “Blackie” Wetzel, a former President of the National Congress of American Indians and Chairman of the Blackfeet Nation. Years earlier, Mr. Wetzel had been deeply involved with U.S. President John F. Kennedy in the movement for civil liberties, civil rights, and economic freedom for all. In 2014, Mr. Wetzel’s son Don commented, “It needs to be said that an Indian from the State of Montana created the Redskins logo, and did it the right way. It represents the Red Nation, and it’s something to be proud of.”

quote:

Originally posted by Skins2881:

quote:

Originally posted by Ronin1069:
I have no issues with Warriors, Chiefs, Tribe, etc.

I seem to be on the opposite side of many in this thread, but Redskins needs to go. Same with characters like Chief Wahoo.

Does this also go for middle and high schools that are on reservations or in very high density Native American populations that have teams named Redskins? Would you force your opinion on them as well or only on the one team?

You have me twisted. I’m not forcing my opinion on anyone, I’m not boycotting anything, and I am not actively working to get the name changed.

I’m simply saying in this thread about the topic, that we probably should not have team nicknames of something you would not call an Indian in the street.

quote:

Originally posted by Ronin1069:

quote:

Originally posted by Skins2881:

quote:

Originally posted by Ronin1069:
I have no issues with Warriors, Chiefs, Tribe, etc.

I seem to be on the opposite side of many in this thread, but Redskins needs to go. Same with characters like Chief Wahoo.

Does this also go for middle and high schools that are on reservations or in very high density Native American populations that have teams named Redskins? Would you force your opinion on them as well or only on the one team?

You have me twisted. I’m not forcing my opinion on anyone, I’m not boycotting anything, and I am not actively working to get the name changed.

I’m simply saying in this thread about the topic, that we probably should not have team nicknames of something you would not call an Indian in the street.

Read the articles above. There are teams, composed largely of Indians, that play on teams named the Redskins...and they are fans of the Washington Redskins...and they often refer to each other by that name as a source of pride.

The current logo was designed by an Indian.

Black people call each other the N-word. We don't have teams named after that word and I cannot imagine many of us would use that word towards a black person if they saw them in the street.

I see the word RedSkin the same way, If I would not call someone I didn't know by that name, there probably should not be pro teams with that nickname.

At the end of the day, I know that I am way out numbered on this opinion and when it comes to forum battles, I don't care enough about the topic to die on this hill.

I might suggest a different response. Change loyalties to another team.

Since professional sports is a waste of time and most of all money and the spoiled shitheads making so damn much money playing a fucking game, I am happy to say they all can eat shit n die. Change their names to dicksucking bendovers for all I care and I hope like hell the all go fucking broke.

quote:

Originally posted by Modern Day Savage:. . . .they often refer to each other by that name as a source of pride.

The current logo was designed by an Indian.

I think there is an important point there. Some "natives" see the name as a matter of pride, not a matter of derision.

quote:

Originally posted by Ronin1069:
At the end of the day, I know that I am way out numbered on this opinion and when it comes to forum battles, I don't care enough about the topic to die on this hill.

Well good...because I'm not taking any shots at you .

I'm simply pointing out that the fact that since A) Indians are playing on football teams named Redskin and B) Fans of the Washington Redskins and C) Calling each other by the name with pride and D) actively designing the team logo (to say nothing of the other polls and efforts by Indians to support the team)...well, if they don't mind the name then maybe we White Skins or Black Skins or Whatever Skins shouldn't either.

Either way, I hope you have a fun and safe Independence Day.

Same, MDS.

I find the Vikings and Celtics team names offensive.

The only team I have left is Alabama Crimson Tide. I wouldn't want them to change their name. Though I can't possibly fathom taking offense to 'Crimson Tide' I'm sure there are outrage merchants out there finding something offensive about it.

Growing up I was a big Steelers fan. It was their heyday - Mean Joe Green, Terry Bradshaw, Jack Lambert, Lynn Swann, etc. I continued to watch the NFL and was a fan. When Obama came along and the Steelers ownership donated, campaigned and pushed Obama I moved away from them. Still watched games here and there until Kaepernick came along. I bailed for the entire 2018 season. Saw maybe 3 games last year and thought maybe they had moved past Kaepernick.

Well, we know now that the NFL is begging that anti-American scumbag for forgiveness, so I'm completely done with the NFL going forward. D.O.N.E.

As for the Redskins - go ahead and give them what they are asking for. Delete all references to American Indians from sports teams, towns, rivers, statues, monuments, etc. Forget they ever existed and in a few generations no one will even remember them. That seems to be what people want these days - delete history and pretend it never happened. Do away with reservations, casinos, the whole nine yards.

Although unlikely to happen, even as a former NFL watcher and Redskin fan, I would derive some pleasure if Snyder sold the Redskins to...say...oh, I don't know, maybe some Indian owned franchise. Let the new Indian owners move the team to a reservation, or at least Reservation owned land conducive to a stadium...and let them retain the name Redskin.

Say something like the Southern Ute Reservation Redskins.

Lonestar Dietz was probably not a Native American, but his linkage with Carlisle Indian School, the Redskins, and early football was genuine.

On the Redskins name? I get the complaint, when enunciated by actual Native Americans. But was the name meant to be a "slur" or was it just a nickname from the times? No one would have named their team after a word that was a slur, or have been proud of saying "I am on the (slur) team." We've come to see it as a verboten slur in this age of sensitivity. So change it, but don't believe that the old-timers were racists because they used this name back in the day.

It would be classy if the Washington team could find a name that honored Native Americans, to show no harm meant. Like Warriors. But one suspects they are looking for a politically correct name. Perhaps an animal name. Although as times change, that may become politically incorrect someday too...