I have a vague memory of having written in passing in a not-recent piece that the left never apologizes, and never says that it was wrong about anything.
That makes it a bit hard to reconcile the front-page story in the Washington Post last week about the local NFL football team, the Washington Redskins. In what was doubtlessly intended to have a different result, the Post had surveyed a statistically significant number of Native Americans across the country and with many different tribal origins.
The result? Some 90% of the respondents identifying as "Native American" had no problem with the Washington football team being called the "Redskins", and a healthy number thought it to be a good, as in complimentary, thing. This, of course, flies squarely in the face of a bazillion editorials and published letters to the editor in that paper complaining of the name and insisting it be changed -- including one this morning.
In an interesting turn, the 90% figure appears to be virtually identical to the results of a similar survey about 12 years ago that also polled the same population. The separation of time, and the fact that the 2004 survey was done by a different organization, suggests that the data is pretty sound, and the results are usable for however a user may want to, well, use it.
I'll use it myself here, but only briefly. In terms of how much offense to glean from a poll of an affected group, I start with the fact that there is a spectrum -- from no one being offended all the way to everyone being offended. I believe that 1% of people taking offense for the perceived slur does not make it a slur. Obviously at 100%, it is a slur; in fact, I would pretty much say that you get as low as 50% and most people would agree that we should not use the term.
But I also feel that you get down to 25% and it's in the noise range, as far as actually asking people to change their actions. If three people out of four have no problem with a word or phrase referring to their group, or ethnicity or religion, then it seems to me it's the "one in four" who are overly sensitive.
And in this case, nine out of ten do not have an issue. So for my two cents, the issue of whether the football team -- whose nickname is shared, among others, by some high schools on reservations -- is resolved. Next issue, thanks. Move forward. The loud will not out-poll the numerous.
Which gets us to the point.
For the Washington Post, a very leftist paper which hates the name "Redskins", even to have printed the results of such a survey on the front page, with pictures even, is startling. It's startling not just because it flies in the face of what the paper's editorial board stands for, but because it makes the case that the concerns voiced by a loud minority, and the PC police who support them, are grossly misplaced -- and fundamentally unrepresentative of the alleged offended. And, of course, it's startling because the left never apologizes.
So why is was it even published?
I'm going to be speculating, because I don't know, and never will. But I think there are probably a few distinct elements at work here.
First -- even though an overwhelming percentage of journalists are leftists, and the reporting of events frequently has slant and even a stated opinion or two, the Post still recognizes that the editorial and news parts of the paper are separated by a nominal firewall. That's Journalism 101. Maybe 201, but at least it's fundamental. Send a reporter out on a story, especially when it's your own darned poll, and you had better print it.
Second -- had the paper squashed the story when it learned the results, all that had to happen was for one employee of the Post to have let the word get out that the polling was remarkably in contrast with the editorial staff's biases, and the proverbial stuff would have hit the fan. One thing a paper does not want to have happen is for it to be seen as letting bias affect the actual running of stories.
Third -- and this is the only FTM (follow the money) aspect I could come up with -- since the survey did not proactively target Native Americans, but rather asked the question only if they so identified, there must have been a lot of people polled, and a lot of work accomplished. The photographs alone suggest that some serious travel expense went on this story, meaning that it didn't get spent on alternative content. One way or the other, there has to be a headline (a piece for another day).
Finally, I do not doubt that someone back in the newsroom was so convinced that he or she was right on the issue, if not the facts, that the order was issued to run the story. "We'll get people talking about it", I suspect was the order, "and once they talk they'll see that the name is offensive." No matter what the polls actually say. It's the infernal pomposity and self-righteousness of the left.
OK, I don't know if any of the above is true, although the first one almost assuredly came up at some point. If so, it would be heartening to know that at least someone at the Post has a shred of journalistic integrity.
But it doesn't change the outcome. The name is not offensive, and now we have concrete evidence that it is not.
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Debaters on both sides tend to miss the main point if the issue. Whether the term Redskins is a slur is irrelevant. It still is a racial term referring to all Native Americans. The term Native Americans or Indians is just as offensive for teams that do not recruit Native Americans nor do they have major Native American participation in general. It is like the term Negro or Colored. Some institutions still use the term, some people find the terms antiquated or offensive and others do not, but it is indisputable that no team that has no active African American participation would ever call themselves the Negroes or the Coloreds without being called racist.
ReplyDeleteWhat makes it even more racist is that Native Americans are consistently the only racial group used for team names and mascots by groups that Do not have any substantial presence or involvement of that group. You do not see any teams that do not have African Americans called some Black racial name, or teams that do not have any Asian participation called any Asian racial name. Even White racial names are unseen even though the majority participation in both the players and the fanbases is European descent. Until we see professional teams being called Palefaces, Negroes, Orientals, etc, the exclusive use of Native American Racial names by professional sports, excluding others, will always be a racist practice, wether it be Redskins, Indians, or other names used to describe or address Native Americans in general like Redmen, Savages (while using sterotype image of a Native), Braves, Chiefs, etc.. That is the main issue that is consistently ignored by the news media when tackling the slur straw man.
Some people try to excuse the use of Redskins and Indians by referring to Vikings, Celtics and Fighting Irish but Vikings and Celtics are ethnic terms, not racial. And most of the teams are run and owned by descendants of Germanic and Celtic tribes so there is no offensiveness. But, in a country, shit, continent, where Native Americans have consistently pushed into the lowest echelons of society, using them as primitive warrior stereotypes, without even acknowledging their diverse ethnicities, is extremely racist.
Finally, the majority of Native Americans do perceive it as offensive when a proper poll is conducted, not flawed phone only, self identification polls (read Elizabeth Warren and Rachel Dolezal) like the Annenberg and Washinton Post polls done nationwide instead of in Indian country, allowing any dick and jane to claim Native.
Here is a serious poll:
Http://cips.csusb.edu/docs/PressRelease.pdf
Note the much higher accuracy in actually identifying Native Americans, not just anyone claiming Native. A popular passtime in the US. Furthermore, region matters as registered tribal nations in the East tend to be much more heavily admixed and look much more mainstream in their features than do populations in the West who are descendants of those forcibly removed in the Andrew Jackson era. Most nations east of the Mississippi look more like me than my father, and rarely have faced phenotype discrimination because they looked Native. Their battles tend to be more about cultural preservation. Most Natives that actually look like Two Guns, White Calf, the Blackfoot who was the model for the buffalo coin and thus the logo of the Redskins are against the use of the name by non-Indians for a team that has no Indian players whatsoever, nor has it had any except for the Haskell Indians used for promotional purposes in their first year and then fired the next year. After that, only one Native played who looked White and fit Marshall's racial ideals and that was Crow. After that, no Native has ever played for the Redskins.
The Redskins would remain the only team that was purely White until it was forced to integrate African Americans. But it doesn't call itself the Palefaces or the Negroes.
I appreciate your lengthy note, Jaime, and hope you will read me regularly. Let me first note that the piece itself was less about whether "Redskins" is offensive and more about journalistic practices at the Post (as well as when it is proper to call ANY such name "offensive"). So I don't particularly want to get too deep into that part.
ReplyDeleteI do want to point out that the Post, which has hollered for years that the name should be changed, discovered from their survey methodology that the opposite of their point was found to be true (i.e., Native Americans did not see the name as offensive), same as the 12-year-old study by some other group. On the other hand, Prof. Fenelon also went into his own study that you cite (thanks for the reference) with a huge, historical bias, having been an activist on the side of being offended. I have a pretty good notion that when you do a survey looking for a result you like, you'll find a way to do so, particularly inside academia. In fact, my support of the Post's results (and the actual topic of the piece) is precisely because that outcome is the last thing they wanted and why they were forced to run with the story.
For example, I would never have asked, as Fenelon did, whether the name was "racial or racist." I'd have asked if it were racial, and THEN I would have asked if it were racist (think "white" and "honky" -- the former is racial, the latter racist). Those are, in the minds of most, different animals. Personally, I find the professor's approach just as flawed, in its own way, as the Post's.
As to your comment about the eastern tribes looking like white people (I think you were saying that) -- take a run up to one of the Connecticut casino resorts run by the Mashantucket Pequots. They had, last I was there ten years back, a board up on the wall with pictures of the owners and directors, all of whom were supposed to be Pequots. They were all black. It was a bit funny.
To be honest, if the Redskins changed their name tomorrow, I wouldn't really care. But they won't, and we'll keep having this discussion accordingly (well, I won't be; it's not that important). But if it keeps some of the left occupied to where they can't do more REAL damage, then it's probably worth it.
So now, a few years later, the Redskins are no more. It's sort of a bummer, for reasons I wrote above, but it's a bigger bummer because the team was never named after real Indians at all, but rather the dress-up Indians who executed the Boston Tea Party -- remember that the team originated as the Boston Redskins. Oh, well. Today's untaught high school seniors wouldn't even know what the Boston Tea Party was anyway.
ReplyDelete