Redskins Controversy

Redskins. To Native Americans, this term is the equivalent of nigger, spic, or cracker. Despite this, Dan Snyder, the owner of the redskins, is adamant about allowing a racial slur to remain the name of Washington’s football team. This football team, by the way, plays in America’s national league, which means this racism is on a national scale. Fortunately, there is legislation that congress is deliberating over that may soon make racist occurrences such as this less prevalent in sports. Regardless, outsiders looking in on America see such great controversy over something so obviously immoral and discriminatory, and this is shameful.

An individual would be opposed to changing the name for one of three reasons. One, this individual is racist, and their stance on this argument is understandable. Two, the individual has a stake in the teams’ income, an owner for example, and changing the team name, all branding and all merchandise associated with the team would be both inconvenient and expensive. Third and finally, a person may argue that the current society exists in a post racial time and that the name of the teams are not intended to be malicious towards any one group, but instead are just names that were created in a different time and have a benign meaning in the current age.  These individuals fail to realize however that though modern society is past racism, racism still exists. Native Americans do not share the same view and are offended by the fact that their people are paraded around, quite literally, as mascots.

All in all, a sad fact remains. The only reason the name has not been changed by now is that Native Americans do not possess much, if any, voting power and are such a minority that they also cannot easily gain national attention for such injustices. If the name of the team was instead ‘the crazy niggers,’ the name would have been changed in a microsecond, many years ago, no questions asked. What’s more, and this is the saddest part of all, congress will most likely not pass the bill, because wealthy individuals such as the owners of the teams will lobby, control, and pay congress to be their puppets in this matter.