Tag Archives: Washington redskins

Epithets and Implicatures, and History as Damage Control

19 Thursday Apr 2018

Posted by in Native American Themes, Politics, White Indians

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I haven’t been monitoring the controversy about the Washington football team that closely for awhile now, but the topic hasn’t entirely escaped my attention. This morning, I took a moment to scan the old Redskinsfacts website, which is a case-study in double-speak if there ever was one. That hasn’t changed.

…either.

One thing I find fascinating and revolting in equal measures is the way the site uses the work of a linguist, Ives Goddard, in defense of the team’s name, If you click on the option to “Get the facts” on the home page of the “Redskins Facts” website, you will be taken to another page telling you about the history of the name. Near as I can tell, that page hasn’t changed in awhile. Here is a screenshot of that history as it is now on 4/19/18:

Screenshot 2018-04-19 12.19.54

With just three items, this is a brief history to be sure, but the omissions aren’t entirely a function of brevity. What they leave out here is every bit as important as what they choose to tell us. Taking their bullet points in reverse order:

Notice they tell us that when the team came into being four players and the head coach “identified themselves as Native Americans.” This wording was carefully chosen to promote a common team legend without actually claiming that legend is true. Defenders of the team name commonly tell us that the team was named after a Native American (William “Lone Star” Dietz). It’s not at all clear that the team name was ever meant to honor him, but more importantly, Dietz’s claims to Native American heritage are questionable at best, having come under intense scrutiny when Dietz stood trial for evading the draft during World War I. The folks at Redskinsfacts.com know very well that team fans team defenders still cite the story of Lonestar Dietz in defense of the team name. Telling us that Dietz claimed a Native American identity enables them to promote that story without actually making any false claims on the topic themselves. So, I guess it’s not an outright lie. More like, a cowardly equivocation.

The second bullet point in this ‘history’ is simply off topic (and rather vague). That prominent native leadership of the 19th century, have referred to themselves as ‘redskins’ does not establish that the term is not now or at any other time free of pejorative implications. Resting as it does in this simple, narrative the claim that some of them have done so does nothing to tell us how they felt about the term or why they came to use it. It doesn’t even enable us to sort which ones called themselves ‘red men’ and which ones called themselves ‘redskins’. It doesn’t address problems of translation. It really doesn’t establish anything except for the sloppy thought process of the website administrator. He’d have to answer a few questions before we could even get to the ‘so what?’ part of the conversation. Or we could just skip to the chase, I suppose.

So what?

The first point in the pseudo-history of the team name is the one that interests me the most. Defenders of the name will often cite Goddard’s article as proof that the term in question is not an insult. (Seriously, I’ve long since lost track of the number of people that have done this,) I always ask them if they have actually read the article. Often that seems to be the end of the conversation. When these folks do tell me they’ve read the article, I ask them if they’ve read the last line in the article. To date, none have answered that question. So, what is the last line in Goddard’s article?

The descent of this word into obloquy is a phenomenon of more recent times.

My point is of course that Goddard didn’t write an article telling us that the term in question is not an insult. He wrote an article telling us that it did not begin as an insult, which is an entirely different claim. It isn’t entirely clear from Goddard’s piece just how he would account for the present significance of the term, but he is very clear on the fact that his own work does not actually address that question. So, the article should leave us with a full stop right around the 1830s. Goddard helps us to understand the use of the term up to that point, and he doesn’t have much to say about anything after that.

Goddard’s work is interesting for a number of reasons, but it doesn’t tell us much about what the term means today, or even what it meant by the end of the 19th century. He does take issue with the claims of at least some modern activists, Susan Shown Harjo being among them, but he himself points out that rejecting her claims about the origin of the term does not prove that many Native Americans find the term objectionable in the present time (p.1). I think Goddard does a pretty good job of showing that Harjo and others have been wrong about the origins of the term, leaving the rest of the case against the team name largely untouched by his article. The correction seems a bit one-sided to me, but at least Goddard has been clear about the limits of his own work on the subject. If he has published anything addressing the later history of the term or correcting any of team’s misuse of his work, I am not aware of it. (If anyone does know of such a response, I would very much appreciate a reference.)

So, why is Goddard’s work the first thing Redskinsfacts.com cites in their history of the term? Well they have to know that many people equate the origin of a term (or at least our earliest known account of it) with its contemporary meaning. This is called the etymological fallacy, and it’s an extraordinarily common mistake. So, they don’t really have to tell us the article proves the term is innocent; the folks at Redskinsfacts.com know very well that is what many of their fans will take away from their reference to the article. Citing Goddard and providing a link to his work enables them to strengthen the impression that the team name is innocent without actually going so far as to say that’s what Goddard has shown. They invite their readers to indulge in an etymological fallacy, just as they invite us to think of Lonestar Dietz as a Native American when he was likely an outright fraud. It’s fascinating to see how the site avoids making the false claims in question, even as they invite readers to infer those very claims from the one they do make.

Don’t get me wrong. This isn’t even the worst of it. Defense of the Washington football team has produced all manner of horribles over the years. This isn’t even the worst of it.

Still, it’s pretty damned deceitful.

And cowardly.

RedskinsFacts Does the Meta-Hypocrisy Shuffle

15 Sunday Mar 2015

Posted by in Native American Themes, Politics

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Redskinsfactsagain

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The accusation of hypocrisy can be a very effective means of facilitating the same. Case in point? This little gem from Redskinsfacts.com. I hesitate to post it, because the link will take you to Blaze TV, which is Glenn Beck’s little neck of the net, but well… professional bigots must at times be answered, even if it means giving petulant children more attention than they deserve.

Glenn Beck is in rare form in that video, trying to turn “What’s up my Cracker?” into a thing. It is neither clever nor insightful, though I suppose he thinks it some sort of social commentary. What his use of the phrase does do is help us understand that some folks never outgrow the adolescent desire to piss off the adults in the room, and that those people frequently find their way into the heart’s and minds of those addicted to right wing political porn. You can also hear some bizarre comments about Hitler’s non-existent children in that video along with something about an alleged apology for his actions. There is nothing in the clip to suggest that Beck and company know this little trip through Godwin’s Law is utter bullshit. Rather, they appear to figure this narrative is true, because, well that’s what must have happened, right?

…which is pretty much how history works in the world of Glenn Beck.

All that aside, Beck’s main point (to the extent that he has one) is that the Oneida Nation of New York is building a casino to be named after The Wizard of Oz. What makes this disturbing is its author’s history of racism. L. Frank Baum advocated the complete annihilation of Native Americans. yes he did. They are right about that. Beck and Company find it absurd that a tribe which has been critical of Washington’s football team would honor the work of a racist. In fact, they find it quite hypocritical.

As you can see above, so do the folks at Redskinsfacts.com.

It pains me to say this, but they do have a point. Whatever the merits of The Wizard of Oz in literature, cinema, or simply marketing strategies, it’s difficult to explain why any Native American community would want to be associated with Baum’s work. We could debate the exact equivalent of naming a casino after a work done by an author whose also expressed racist views and the use of a name that directly perpetuates racist stereotypes with every mention made of it throughout the entire football season, but some might think that was splitting hairs (or giant redwood trees, …whatever!). At the end of the day, they do have a point; this is a problem.

Of course the problem doesn’t end there. Inconsistencies abound in politics, and one can hardly point at the second face of someone else without raising questions about his own self-presentation. Beck and company aren’t really trying to get the tribe to drop its plans for a casino named after Baum’s work, and they are certainly uninterested in spreading the word about Baum’s racism. No, this is an opportunistic moment for them, a chance to seize on a misstep by those who threaten their world in some tiny way. Beck and company are defending the name of the Washington football team, and that team is thoroughly invested in racism at every level of its organization. The Oneida Nation of New York could easily reconsider its pans (and let us hope they do), but a change of the Washington team’s name would require re-branding on a scale unimaginable to some folks. If this is a tale of two racisms it is a tale in which one of them is a Hell of a lot more important than the other. Beck and company know this, and they are hoping their audience doesn’t. As explained by one of Beck’s talking heads, the name of the team has always been used to honor Native Americans.

…he is of course lying.

It’s interesting to watch Beck and company run through the motions of pretending to discuss the issue as one of his talking heads plays good cop to the other guy’s bad cop. His sole effort in defense of the Oneida is to remind us of Washington Team’s name and to add that they are playing football. That’s it. That’s what Beck and company offer to speak for the case against the Washington team’s name. And of course they move on to suggest that the Oneida must be trying to accomplish something secret in attacking the team name. Bad cop can’t quite tell us what that is, and of course he’s somehow forgotten all the other Native Americans who also oppose the team name, but he can probably rely on most of Beck’s audience to forget this as well. Ultimately, the bottom line in this segment is a clear defense of the Washington Team by mans of a simple tu quoque fallacy.

If Beck and company say “what about you” loud enough, they hope everyone will forget about their own politics and those they hope to support through segments like this.

This is of course also the only reason the folks at Redskins Facts bring it up as well. They too are not the least bit interested in saving any indigenous people from exposure to the racist views of L. Frank Baum. They merely hope to embarrass a political enemy by pointing out the inconsistency of linking themselves to the work of a racist while opposing their own team name. They are right to the extent that there is an inconsistency in this, but that inconsistency stands like a mirror reflection of their own agenda. They hope to deflect attention from the racism saturating their own politics by calling attention to the hypocrisy of one of their principle critics. In doing so, they themselves become hypocrites themselves, and their sole hope is that no-one will notice the reflexive nature of the problem.

We can well ask if the Oneida should be building this casino while opposing the name of the Washington football team. We can also ask if RedskinsFacts.com, Glenn Beck, and all his talking heads ought to be complaining about what an Indian tribe chooses to name its casino while defending a sports team with an explicitly racist name?

I’m guessing the better answer is ‘no’ on both counts, but then again, we all know we won’t be getting that kind of answer from the folks pushing this story any time soon.