CSotD: Athletically Incorrect
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Because he makes money and y'all didn't. Duh.
The Argyle Sweater hits the mark a fair number of times, but rarely in a way that inspires commentary. Today's does, in large part because it comes up by happenstance in the wake of the conservative show of feigned puzzlement over Chick-fil-A, a purposeful stupidity that is also regularly displayed over the topic of Washington's NFL franchise nickname.
The right ramped up the Chick-fil-A stupidity for its own purposes, which seems a more pragmatically effective strategy than the professorial appeal to logic favored by liberals like Barack Obama and Elizabeth Warren. (Obama and Warren are former law school professors, which may have given them an outlandish confidence in the likelihood of the average person absorbing new information.)
Which is to say, I don't think there is an actual, endemic partisan slant to "stupid," though there may be a partisan slant to "cynical," given that only one side seems eager to exploit the "stupid" factor.
In any case, it seems obvious that "Redskins" is a racist term, and yet people dance around it, defend it and generally behave with a level of insensitivity that maketh the jaw to drop.
"Well, then I guess we can't have 'The Fighting Irish' or 'The Minnesota Vikings,'" they say with the triumphant air of a six-year-old who thinks he has come up with a clever rejoinder, ignoring, from the start, that "Irish" and "Viking" are not ethnic slurs and, at the next cognitive level, that a lot of students at Notre Dame are, in fact, of Irish heritage and that Minnesota was settled by a large number of Scandanavians.
Notre Dame did not invent "The Fighting Irish," by the way, having come to athletic prominence before college teams had formal nicknames. The press would add colorful epithets, so that, just as firefighters become "blaze busters" and police are "cops," Notre Dame was sometimes called "The Westerners" and "The Plainsmen" before someone came up with the name that stuck and was then embraced by the school.
Whereupon creative geniuses began a long tradition of pointing out the members of the team who were not, in fact, Irish. Yeah, well, all I know is that, after a few weeks on campus freshman year, I reverted to my high school nickname of "Pete" because I was tired of turning around every time someone yelled, "Hey, Mike!"
Where Indian mascots become problematic is where the names are not actual slurs and do, to some extent, reflect history. The Fighting Illini at the University of Illinois went to some lengths to build bridges with the Indian community, but finally abandoned the mascot under NCAA pressure. Florida State has worked closely with Seminoles to fine-tune their symbol, but, no matter how authentic the character may become, the fans in the stands do a "war chant" that could just as well be a minstrel show routine.
And there are various polls about who thinks what and who's offended by what, but in North Dakota, where the university could claim the same historic claim to "The Fighting Sioux" as Minnesota has to "The Vikings," they actually held a referendum in June in which voters rejected the Indian name by a margin of two-to-one, which would appear a strong statement for change but which is, of course, dismissed as "political correctness" by the losers in the poll.
Incidentally, North Dakota is just under 5% Indian, and, going by ethnic distribution, has a much stronger claim to call their school's team "The Vikings."
Getting back to the NFL, the name "Redskins" is not the name of a people and is pretty much on a level with "spic" or "coon" or "kike," which makes me wonder at the insensitivity of white folks who, if they can't see the offense in "redskin," can't at least understand that maybe the people to whom it is applied have a problem with it that should be considered.
It's easy enough for me to shrug off Notre Dame's idiotic "leprechaun" mascot, a Steppin McFetchit character straight from the vaudeville stage. I'm only half-Irish to begin with, and it's not like the Irish haven't achieved enough success in this country to blow off all but the most egregious drunk jokes anyway.
But, in a community that (justifiably) feels powerless, these issues can be problematic; I was working on a collection of Chippewa, Blackfeet and Cree folk tales and asked a Saginaw friend whether the name "Chippewa" or "Ojibway" was preferred.
"We really don't care," he responded. "Most times that the name is written on a piece of paper, it's because you're taking something else away from us."
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