“Slurs” No More

Written by: Cory Puffett

Published: July 13, 2020

As you no doubt have heard by now, Washington’s football team announced today that they are officially retiring their nickname and are in the process of selecting a new name and logo that will “not use any Native American imagery.”

In December of 2013, I wrote a blog post on my old blog titled 'The Washington "Slurs,"' an extension of a college journalism assignment, in which I defended the use of the name. I considered as many sides to the situation as I could think of at the time.

I considered the history of the name, with the understanding that there is a lot of controversy over how accurate the origin story is or even whether the coach we were supposedly “honoring” was actually Native American.

I considered public opinion of various American Indian sources, including the differing opinions of the Oneida Indian Nation and of Robert Green, a retired Chief of the Patawomeck Tribe in the Fredericksburg area. I also considered various polls that have been conducted over the past 20+ years, most of which suggest that somewhere in the neighborhood of 90 percent of American Indians do not find the term offensive.

I considered the fact that there were high schools in the U.S. with majority American Indian student populations that use “Redskins” as their nickname. It should be noted that, while one Navajo high school in Red Mesa, Arizona “emerged as a defender of the Washington Redskins” nearly a year after I wrote my blog post, several of these high schools have since dropped the name from their sports programs.

I even, regrettably, went so far as to try to compare the term “Redskin” to the N-word. I, a white 21-year-old, suggested that it was a viable argument to rate the ‘badness’ of two racial slurs used to describe people of two races to which I do not belong. What the hell was I thinking?

Ultimately, I suggested that while “I do understand and acknowledge that some people are offended by Washington’s nickname, I also firmly believe that we cannot set a precedent such that we must go about changing anything and everything that people are offended by.”

I was young and naïve. I’m less young and naïve than I once was, but am still more so than I will be in another seven years. And yet I’ve come to understand things differently and, I think, better than I used to.

If you were keeping track, there was a glaring omission from my list of considerations as I wrote that blog post back in 2013. The term “Redskins,” offensive or not, is a slur used to describe an entire race of people. It is a slur. It’s a word that literary scholars have found to be used in a negative context far more commonly than in a positive one since at least the 1870s.

Still, this alone didn’t really convince me. Through my entire life, when I thought of the word “Redskins,” the first and only thing that came to my mind was the football team. I never thought of American Indians when I heard the name, so in my naïve mind the two weren’t even linked.

My change of opinion has been the result of many things, but perhaps none more significant than when Bomani Jones joined Mike & Mike in April of 2016 sporting a “Caucasians” t-shirt, printed in the style of the Cleveland Indians name with a pale depiction of their since-retired Chief Wahoo logo.

I didn’t personally find offense at the t-shirt, and it’s only become funnier to me with time. But aside from the humor I found in the shirt, it demonstrated two things to me and both are of great importance to my change of opinion on the Washington NFL team’s nickname.

The first thing it demonstrated is that just because I didn’t associate the term “Redskins” with American Indians doesn’t mean that it doesn’t come to mind when an American Indian, or anybody else, hears the team’s name. Sure, there’s more history to the “Washington Redskins” than to “Caucasians,” which doesn’t and has never been the name of a sports franchise – so what else could anybody possibly think of when seeing Bomani’s shirt? But it allowed me to realize that just because I had never linked the two myself doesn’t mean the name and the group of people it refers to aren’t linked.

The second thing Bomani’s shirt demonstrated to me really didn’t come from the shirt itself but from the reactions to the shirt. So many white people took to the Internet to complain and express their disgust and offense at the shirt. ESPN even asked him to cover up the shirt before he went on Mike & Mike, and I’m very thankful that he didn’t listen to them.

The people who found the shirt offensive were the same people expressing annoyance that people couldn’t get over Washington’s team name. They didn’t, and largely still don’t, recognize their own hypocrisy. In one breath they call people ‘snowflakes’ when they want to change a team’s name, and in the next breath cry foul when somebody wears a t-shirt appearing to mock white people.

Now I’m seeing comments on Facebook and Instagram by people claiming that they’re giving up on the team because of this. Some people are even going so far as to say, “I’m ashamed of the NFL and you. Never thought I’d give up on football but it happened today.”

If either of those comes close to your thoughts on the subject, whether expressed in your head alone or on your social media, know that YOU are the ‘snowflake’ for allowing yourself to be so offended by an organization deciding to do what it thinks is the best thing (even if it’s more of a financial than altruistic decision). And know that we won’t miss you.

I put you in the same box as people who claimed that they gave up on NASCAR because they banned the confederate flag. If that’s enough to turn you off to the sport, you never really cared about the cars traveling in circles for four hours every Sunday. You just wanted a public place in which to hang out with a bunch of other racist battle flag-wavers like yourself.

And now today, if a simple name change is enough to turn you off to the team or the sport, you weren’t a fan of the team or the sport to begin with. You just really liked the free reign to use a racial slur and you’re upset that it’ll no longer be socially acceptable to do so without outing yourself as a racist.

So, if you’re giving up on the team or the sport for this reason, good riddance. We don’t need that energy in our community.