Quote:
Originally Posted by Detoxing
Braves, Indians and Chiefs don't directly refer to someone's skin color, nor were they used as a slur in the 1800's-1900's to summarize a type of people.
It's a pretty damn important nuance.
It's very simple to me: Society wouldn't tolerate a "Blackskins" team. Most of us would agree it's in poor taste.
Society would go ape shit over a "Whiteskins" team.
Why is Redskins any different?
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Yeah, the interesting part of this is that people on all sides become so entrenched that there's no reasonable discussion. I have misgivings about replacing names like Braves and Chiefs. I don't think they're inherently disparaging terms, and I view with skepticism the notion of "embracing diversity" by deleting public references to a culture. I think people view the Redskins name as the opening salvo of a larger war and they want to hold the line, but defending the name "Redskins" is a folly.
It would appear to me that the line of reasonableness falls somewhere between Redskins and Braves. Redskins is clearly over the line. Maybe Indians is as well, though I find it hard to view it as a racial thing when we've also got the Vikings and patriots that are the same concept. I think Braves is under the line because it's not about Indians, it's about warriors and it's clearly honorific. Braves is equivalent to Cowboys and Oilers and Packers.
It's not racially motivated, but rather is vocationally oriented. Chiefs is closer to the line than Braves, but still under it for the same reason. As others have noted, I think the issue lies with the tertiary activities like the chop and the horse and that sort of thing.
Others may have different opinions about where the line is, of course, but our challenge is that we don't know what the rule is for changing. Does it change if more than 50 percent are offended? Or do we change if one person out of our 300 million is offended?
Or are the only opinions that count those of the population being portrayed? I'd be fine with that as a decision rule, but if that's the case then I don't want to hear the opinions of the non-portrayed population. We put the question to our population of Native Americans and let them decide. And then we go to our Scandinavian population about Vikings and our tiger population about Bengals.