On Facebook last night, someone I know posted the following status:
"So there is this president from Chicago who has beef with the name 'Washington Redskins' because it is derogatory to Native Americans.....meanwhile, the same president has nothing to say about his hometown NHL hockey team that is titled the 'Blackhawks'....and their logo is a Native American. Kettle...meet pot. Pot-Kettle"
I was reluctant on joining the discussion at first, until this morning, when I read through 15-20 Obama-bashing comments. These ranged from: "You've got more important things to be worried about!" to "He is the most bass ackwards person in this country!"
Then when the poster of the status said the term "Redskins" "could" be seen as derogatory, I finally decided enough was enough and made the following comment:
"I wasn't going to chime in here, but this is getting ridiculous. The guy was asked a question in an interview with the AP about the Washington 'Redskins.' How was he supposed to answer it?
'Well, I can understand how that name could be taken as derogatory, but allow me to not answer your question by talking about the Chicago Blackhawks instead.'?
His actual quote was: 'If I were the owner of the team and I knew that there was a name of my team–even if it had a storied history–that was offending a sizable group of people, I’d think about changing it.'
That's a very general, politically-safe statement, which is in response to a question pertaining to the 'Redskins,' but doesn't necessarily mean he doesn't feel similarly about other such names which offend certain groups of people.
Like it or not, the Washington 'Redskins' is the big story with regard to controversial team names, so sports-writers are talking about it, politicians are being asked about it, etc. While there are other such Native American-affiliated names, the one causing the big stir at the moment is the Washington 'Redskins,' which is why the president was asked about them in the interview and not any other team.
Obama spent 10 seconds responding to this question. It's not like he's fighting for a name-change. He simply responded a question in an interview.
Also, there's no 'could' about the name 'Redskins' being derogatory. It is. It's history. It doesn't matter if some people don't think of it as such. Some people don't believe man landed on the moon. That doesn't mean the event didn't occur.
NPR's Lakshmi Gandhi wrote a recent article, entitled, 'Are You Ready For Some Controversy? The History Of 'Redskin,'' where he said the following:
'Decades later, the word 'redskin' began to take on a negative, increasingly violent connotation. Author L. Frank Baum, best known for his classic The Wizard of Oz, celebrated the death of Sitting Bull and the massacre at Wounded Knee with a pair of editorials calling for the extermination of all remaining Native Americans. In one of the December 1890 pieces, Baum wrote, 'With his fall the nobility of the Redskin is extinguished and what few are left are a pack of whining curs who lick the hand that smites them.''
and
'In 1915, the poet Earl Emmons released Redskin Rimes, a book so offensive I had to double-check to make sure it wasn't a parody of the racism of that era.'
and
'Emmons' book was emblematic of the usage of the word 'redskins' in the late 1800s and early 1900s, as the word went from being an identifying term to a derogatory slur.'
and
'And when the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian hosted a symposium on Indian mascots in February, museum director Kevin Gover, himself a Native American, said the word was 'equivalent of the N-word.''
President Obama took 10 seconds of his life to provide a relatively general, safe answer in response to a question posed by the Associated Press and receives harsh criticism from some for it? Like I said with the title of this post, to some, Obama just can't do anything right.
http://tv.msnbc.com/2013/10/07/obama-weighs-in-on-redskins-name-controversy/
http://www.npr.org/blogs/codeswitch/2013/09/09/220654611/are-you-ready-for-some-controversy-the-history-of-redskin
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