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The Nickname Game

By Joe Sobran

I quit following football long ago, so I didn't care one way or the other when the Redskins finally made the playoffs. But it was an occasion for downright gloom for a Muskogee Indian woman, who the Washington Post columnist Courtland Milloy says has "sensitized" him.

Guess how? She takes strong exception to the team nickname "Redskins." It's "so racist" and reminds her of "genocide." She takes umbrage at seeing a team mascot, a black man, dressed in what Milloy describes as "a white man's version of an Indian outfit," implying, I suppose, that real Indians never wore feathered headdresses and war paint.

What then does the Indian woman think the team should be called? "Wild Hogs, because they suggest the real sport in Washington, which is pork barreling." This cynical joke inadvertently touches the real point: that team nicknames are supposed to suggest admirable qualities. It would be hard to root for the New York Swindlers, the Chicago Butchers, or the San Francisco Misfits.

Our local team used to be the "Boston Braves," till the owner changed the nickname to the "Boston Redskins" to distinguish it from the baseball Braves, then also in Boston. When he moved the team to Washington in the 1930s, he kept the new nickname, which has persisted through several changes of ownership.

"Redskins" is a colloquialism that wouldn't be picked today. But for that matter, no ethnic organization founded today would say it was fighting for "colored people." Yet nobody seems to object that NAACP still stands for National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

Once upon a time, colored people seemed preferable to the usual slang term, which, as Mark Twain attests, caused little offense. But in time politesse came to prefer "Negro." Then, in the late 1960s, we were told that Negro had somehow become "offensive," so everyone adopted "black" (which had formerly been considered rude). In the 1990s (remember them?) black was widely replaced by the clumsy "African-American," in keeping with the vogue for pride in African "roots."

Why Africa should be sentimentalized by the same people who damn the Confederacy remains a mystery, since Southern slavery was imported from Africa, where slavery still persists. But of course we are supposed to believe that Africa was the Garden of Eden - the land of the Afro hairdo, the dashiki, and Kwanzaa - while the white man invented slavery and genocide and stuff.

We are dealing not with genuine refinements but merely with revolving stereotypes. For all we know, the phrase African-American, may, in its turn, join the long roster of "offensive" epithets, when the descendants of American slaves realize that their ancestors were originally enslaved by their African brethren, who realized they could be swapped for the finest fruits of European civilization, such as whiskey.

But far from being univocally racist, the white man has romanticized the American Indian since the days of Fenimore Cooper, naming baseball and football teams - Indians, Braves, Redskins, Seminoles, Cherokees, Hurons, et cetera - in honor of the Indian's prowess as a warrior. The notion that such names are ethnic slurs is one of the many absurdities of this era of victim politics. Who'd have guessed that the descendants of those stoical braves Sitting Bull and Pontiac would become such whiners?

It does honor to both races that even during the era of violent hostilities between them, the white man could see heroism in the red man. The noble profile of an Indian used to grace the nickel. Even little English boys used to love pretending to be Indians; they seldom pretended to be African warriors.

As we all know, the American Indian has no roots in India, so "Indians" have lately become "Native Americans." But American is a word of Italian derivation, so there may be more trouble ahead when it sinks in with "Native Americans" that they have been renamed - irony of ironies! - after a European paleface. At this point let us pause to thank our Scandinavian-American friends for not allowing their little feelings to be hurt by the fact that a certain Midwestern football team is named after the Vikings. The sons of the Norsemen never caught onto the silly fads of the twentieth century, and they are the better for it.

The Reactionary Utopian by Joe Sobran is copyright (c) 2011 by the Fitzgerald Griffin Foundation, http://www.fgfbooks.com. All rights reserved.

Joe Sobran (February 23, 1946 - September 30, 2010) was an author and a syndicated columnist. See his bio and archive of some of his writings at http://www.fgfbooks.com/Sobran-Joe/Sobran-bio.html

This column was published originally by Griffin Internet Syndicate on January 11, 2000.