Posted on August
31, 2014
Don’t Gimme
An “N”
“Redskins” is nothing like the “N-word”
by
Daniel
Clark
If you’ve watched any media panel discussions about
the Washington Redskins’ nickname, you’ve noticed that the typical, knee-jerk liberal
response is, “Calling a team the Redskins is no different from calling it the
N-word.” A more honest critic would stop
to wonder why that’s never been done.
It can’t be that people have been more sensitive
about offending blacks than Indians. Back
when many sports teams were given their nicknames, nobody would have guessed
that a racial slur would one day be censored as “the N-word.” The football team previously known as the
Boston Redskins was christened in 1933, back when cartoons, radio shows and
other pop media were totally unrestrained in their willingness to denigrate
black people. There was obviously no
stigma against racism toward blacks in those days, so why wouldn’t somebody
have named his sports team “the N-word”?
Because
it’s an insult, that’s why. A sports
team does not select a nickname for the purpose of adopting its negative
connotations. Yet the politically
correct wonks at the U.S. patent office, when they called the Redskins name
“disparaging,” must have believed that the football team meant to disparage
itself.
The debate ought to end right there. If anyone questions whether the Redskins name
is disparaging, or “hostile and abusive” in NCAA lingo, the immediate answer
should be that it must not be, otherwise the team would never have adopted the
nickname. No team owner is going to name
his team something he views disrespectfully.
That’s why you don’t see any sports teams with names like the Telemarketers,
the Manson Family or the In-Laws. It’s
also why a vast majority of fans, including American Indians, have absolutely
no problem with the Redskins name.
What makes this difficult to explain to liberals is
that the legitimacy of the disparagement charge depends on the intention of
whomever assigned the nickname, whereas liberals feel that everything is about
themselves, and is therefore defined by their perception. It doesn’t matter how illogical it is to
believe that someone who hates Indians would want a picture of an Indian on
practically everything he owns. The
important thing is that a liberal’s taking offense to the name Redskins makes
him feel superior, therefore Redskins must be disparaging.
By demanding the elimination of allegedly
“disparaging” or “hostile and abusive” nicknames, the liberal news media and
the even more liberal sports media are essentially nailing a “Whites Only” sign
on the team mascots’ locker room door.
When confronted with this unintentional outcome, they’re bound to
decide, out of “fairness,” that all human sports mascots ought to be banned.
Take
the Dallas Cowboys, for instance. As we
remember from the Reagan and G.W. Bush years, liberals use the term “cowboy”
disparagingly. Besides, did anybody
conduct a poll among the “rustic community” to make sure they unanimously
approved?
NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell
said last year, “If one person is offended, we have to listen,” but evidently
that doesn’t apply to those who are offended by hollow liberal sanctimony. As long as the aim is to avoid offending
liberals, there’s practically no end to it. Even if all human mascots were stamped out,
there are those animal liberation zealots who have argued that naming teams
after animals is exploitative.
It doesn’t matter how irrational that is. The important thing is that someone is
offended, so Goodell and others who subscribe to the
one-offended-liberal rule have got to treat it like a serious matter. Before much longer, we’ll find ourselves
watching a game between the Seattle Sustainability and the New Orleans Bicuriosity. Then again, few of us would watch any such
thing, which may be the entire point.
Liberals are doing to football what Marge Simpson
did to Itchy & Scratchy. They’re
perfectly willing to destroy the product as long as it fails to conform to
their worldview. To them, football is a
mean game in which people get hurt. The
players say unkind things to hurt each other’s feelings, and even seize
territory by force, without intervention from a conflict resolution team. Wouldn’t it be much better if both teams
could share the football, and work together toward a common goal?
Of course it wouldn’t, which explains
everything. Liberals live for the
purpose of spoiling everyone else’s fun, because exercising the ability to do
so is the one thing that liberals themselves have fun doing. Feeding that power through a series of
incremental concessions isn’t going to slow down their onslaught, any more than
a prevent defense prevents the opposing team from scoring.
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