The Washington Redskins claim that their team name is meant to “honor and respect” Native Americans, not offend them. But they may not like it if the shoe were on the other foot.
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Washington (AFP) – The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office on Wednesday cancelled the federal registration of the Washington Redskins’ name after it agreed that it is “disparaging of Native Americans.”
The decision, which the American football team can appeal, is a victory for American Indians and their supporters for whom “redskins” is racially charged word.
In a statement, the Patent Office said five Native American petitioners had “met their burden to establish that the term ‘Redskins’ was disparaging of Native Americans, when used in relation to professional football services.”
While the team can keep using the name, it will no longer enjoy the protection from copyright infringement and counterfeiting that comes with federal registration, it said.
Dan Snyder, owner of the National Football League (NFL) franchise, has been adamant about retaining the name despite a growing national campaign spearheaded by the Oneida tribe in upstate New York.
“If the most basic sense of morality, decency and civility has not yet convinced the Washington team and the NFL to stop using this hateful slur, then hopefully today’s patent ruling will,” said Oneida representative Ray Halbritter.
That’s because “it imperils the ability of the team’s billionaire owner to keep profiting off the denigration and dehumanization of Native Americans,” said Halbritter in an email to AFP.
Photo: Keith Allison via Flickr
Twenty-four dollars.
That, supposedly, was the price Governor Peter Minuit paid American Indians for the island of Manhattan in 1625. It’s a tale historians find suspect.
In the first place, whatever Minuit paid was in goods valued at 60 17th-century Dutch guilders; the calculation that this equaled 24 U.S. dollars was made two centuries later — on what basis, evidently, no one can say. In the second place, the Indians with whom he traded had no understanding of the European idea that land could be sold, no conception of it as a thing one could own.
But whatever the details of the transaction, the moral of the story has remained beacon-clear for four centuries: The Indians got taken. It was hardly the last time they would be snookered in their dealings with the newcomers from across the water.
So it is gratifying to watch the response of at least some Native Americans as the professional football team that plays for the city of Washington unveils a new bit of flimflam in response to ever-growing demands that it find something else to call itself. You likely know the team’s official name, but if not, you won’t read it here. Call them the Washington Racial Slurs, a name fully descriptive of the anti-Indian insult under which they play.
The Oneida Indian Nation has been pushing the Slurs to change their name. A number of sports reporters and media outlets have vowed to refrain from using the ugly word and even conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer recently came out against it.
Slurs owner Dan Snyder has tried several stratagems to blunt this campaign. He has tried bluster (“We’ll never change the name. It’s that simple. NEVER — you can use caps.”). He has tried the appearance of reason (“I’ve listened carefully to the commentary and perspectives on all sides, and I respect the feelings of those who are offended by the team name.”)
Last month, he tried money.
Apparently having just discovered the appalling conditions — high rates of poverty, sickness, suicide — in which too many American Indians live, Snyder created something called the Original Americans Foundation “to provide meaningful and measurable resources that provide genuine opportunities for Tribal communities.”
The response from at least two American Indian groups has been unambiguous: Thanks, but no thanks. The National Indian Gaming Association and the Notah Begay III Foundation both pulled out of a charity golf tournament last weekend that was to provide scholarships for Native American students, after learning OAF was the title sponsor of the event. “I find it underhanded and despicable that the Washington football team would co-opt this event,” Crystal Echo Hawk, the executive director of Notah Begay, told USA Today.
Ouch. Washington is not usually embarrassed that badly till after the season starts.
Perhaps Snyder’s refusal is rooted in pure sentiment — as a child, he was a Slurs fan — perhaps in business concerns, perhaps in both. Either way he misses the point by a wide margin if he truly believes his glorified publicity stunt will fix — or even address — the problem. It won’t. It can’t.
Native Americans were not just cheated. They were removed and they were killed down to a tattered remnant shoved off to the margins of American life. So what Snyder seeks to buy is not just the right to use an execrable name in peace but also the self-respect of a people already long brutalized. And while scholarships are important, it is also important to be able to look at oneself in a mirror.
Nearly 400 years ago, Peter Minuit took Manhattan from people who had no concept of land as a thing that could be bought or sold. Turns out some of them feel that way about dignity, too.
(Leonard Pitts is a columnist for The Miami Herald, 1 Herald Plaza, Miami, Fla., 33132. Readers may contact him via email at lpitts@miamiherald.com.)
AFP Photo/Patrick McDermott
Using slurs seems a simple issue: It is morally wrong and offensive.
But to Roger Goodell, the NFL commissioner, “the issue is undeniably complex.”
Goodell wrote those words in a very sophisticated and carefully crafted Feb. 27 letter defending the name of the football team in the nation’s capital. The National Memo has obtained a copy of the letter, which was probably drafted by lawyers. You can read it here.
The team’s name is intended to “honor and respect” the heritage of native peoples, Goodell wrote. Those would be the original inhabitants who, from Columbus forward, the European explorers thought nothing of raping, enslaving, torturing and slaughtering because to them the native peoples whose skin was a different color simply were not fellow human beings.
To put this in modern perspective, imagine if Goodell’s stated reasons for the team name were applied not to native peoples, but to the heritage of those kidnapped in Africa and brought to America by force.
The Washington Slaves. Imagine if Goodell had to write a letter defending that name which, after all, by his own terms celebrates another part of our heritage. That name is also more historically appropriate for the city than its current name, given that the District of Columbia was a slave-holding city.
What, in principle, is the difference between the current name of the football team and my suggested name? After all, Georgia lawmakers so love their state’s slavery heritage that they voted to put the Confederate flag on specialty license plates.
The letter reveals that Goodell, like many of his fellow white Americans, is afflicted with a social disease. Physicians would call it privilegium candidioris cutis. In English that’s white skin privilege.
People so afflicted are blinded by the economic and social benefits of their external casing, so much so that they cannot recognize their own privileged status and often perceive themselves as victims of those who lack the skin tone they call flesh.
This disease, however, can be cured through education and contemplative exercises that develop, in tandem, intellectual strength and moral clarity.
Goodell knows better than what he wrote. Last September he told a Washington radio sports station, when speaking about the local team’s name, “If we are offending one person, we need to be listening and making sure that we’re doing the right things to try to address that.”
The problem there is with “if.” There is no “if,” because in fact many people of many skin tones are offended.
Defending the indefensible does not come cheap. NFL team owners promoted Goodell over 32 years from intern to commissioner. For the 2012 season they paid him $44.2 million, up from almost $30 million the year before. So at the least we know Goodell’s price, which shows that the cost of defending racism in 21st-century America has gone up.
Goodell wrote his defense of racism to Senator Maria Cantwell, a Washington Democrat, and Representative Tom Cole, an Oklahoma Republican who identifies as a member of the Chickasaw people. I got a copy over the transom, as we say in the news business.
“The National Football League has great respect for your interest in this matter, and we appreciate the opportunity to continue the dialogue,” Goodell genuflected in his opening to the two lawmakers before trying ever so carefully to explain away the racism that his letter reveals is the official, but unacknowledged, credo of NFL owners.
Why blame the other owners? Because they put Goodell in his job and they could put pressure on team owner Daniel Snyder to change the name. If, as Goodell very subtly suggests, a new name would temporarily damage the value of the team, the other owners could just lavish some money on Snyder as a balm.
The letter was written with extraordinary care in an effort to defuse any continued complaints by the two lawmakers, who could introduce bills that would take away the NFL’s privileged status as a tax-exempt nonprofit.
Goodell’s letter cites polls showing that large majorities of Americans either support the team name or are not offended. The problem with that argument is it makes Goodell craven, not principled. Instead of claiming he is just following orders, he postures as someone who just follows popular opinion.
Goodell then makes four points reiterating the tired old fiction that the football team name “was intended by the team to honor and respect the many positive associations with Native Americans and their culture. There has never been a suggestion that the name had any other purpose at any time in the team’s history.”
If sports journalists, some of whom do superb reporting about the broader issues in commercial sports, would ask Commissioner Roger Goodell, Washington team owner Daniel Snyder, the other team owners — and players in the locker room — one question again and again, it would help cure the National Football League of its dreadful social disease. The question:
Would you associate yourself with a football team named the Washington Slaves?
Photo: Keith Allison via Flickr
Commissioner Goodell’s letter can be read below:
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