Federal Judge: U.S. can be Indian givers:Redskins not trademarked

Nobody is getting a pass. I would get rid teams of all peoples' names, but it's not my call. And nobody is forcing you to say the word "Redskins" -- nor is anyone forcing Peter King, Mike Wise or Bob Costas. Or to watch them.

But don't suggest "Fighting Irish" isn't an ethnic stereotype. Or that "Fighting" does not have a twin brother named "Drunk" to which he is joined at the hip.

So the question is, who gets to decide? And the answer is, the owner of the team.

And this and other owners will change team nicknames when commercial pressure forces them to do so.

That battle is better fought universally on behalf of all peoples because then, at least, it is coherent and consistent. Otherwise one is left to argue that Native Americans are too pathetic to look out for themselves, or that "Fighting Irish" does not carry negative connotations, and both arguments are pitiable.

Fair enough - good response.

Edit to add that Notre Dame's name never bothered me because I've always thought of it in the sense one might refer to a team as the "Fighting Tigers", or even a bit in a complementary way like "the Irish are tough and they'll keep fighting to the end!", but perhaps that is probably being naive?

Now I'm interested in the origin of the "Fighting Irish" nickname. (Of course, even a benign origin doesn't necessarily mean that a name isn't offensive.) This is the first thing I found on Google. N.b. that this is from the Notre Dame website, so consider the source.

http://www.und.com/trads/nd-m-fb-name.html

Here is another, still UND website, but acknowledges some derisiveness to the origin.

https://www.nd.edu/features/whats-in-a-name/

Anyhow, back to the regularly scheduled thread.

If you prefer film, pop in "The Quiet Man" starring John Wayne and Maureen O"Hara. Then read Irish- American actor Malachy McCourt's critique of same.

dcmissle said:

By that standard, then, you'll have to ban Notre Dame's mascot, the Fighting Irish, and all the rest of it...

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At the risk of putting too fine a point on it, you don't actually "have to". It is possible and even desirable to be able to solve some social ills and injustices without simultaneously solving all of them.

Offensiveness, if that is really the right word for what we are talking about here, is a fuzzy, blurry, subjective concept. Which definitely does not mean it's not "real", just that the definition is elastic and elusive.

I'm not sure that it is a proved hypothesis that Washington and Notre Dame have identically problematic names. But even assuming they do, it is not automatically necessary to solve them both at the same time and with the same policy, any more than each murder investigation must simultaneously solve all murders, or else cease.

To your point, consideration of unintended second- and third-order effects is a really valuable tool of policy making, and you are absolutely right to bring up the broader implications of PC police and banning colorful names that may be partly offensive, while also being widely beloved. But even if you had proved to a certainty that the issues are entirely identical, it doesn't mean that we cannot solve one problem at a time.

Fair points all.

But who is the arbiter of this one? Guys like me who have one Native American friend spanning an entire life, and have maybe encountered causally 4 Native Americans?

Please, I don't want that responsibility. It's enough to give self identifying liberals like me a bad name. Fascist. Or, if that is overstating it, intolerant asshole.

That poll matters to me. It substantially changed my thinking on the name. The poll is indisputably accurate, in my view, because WaPost does good polling, because the paper clearly did not like the results of its own poll, and because no name critic has produced a poll with different results -- and don't tell me someone didn't try.

It comes down to -- if the vast majority of Native Americans are not offended, if they are focused on greater issues of consequence, who am I to say they have it wrong and insist that the name be changed?

Clearly, there is a spectrum. We can all think of brand names from yesteryear that are obviously completely unacceptable today.

I don't have very strong feelings on the Redskins name personally, but I think a fair-ish test for stuff like this is something like: would it be acceptable to use this name for a new franchise today?

I think "Fighting Irish" would probably be filtered out in 2016, but "Redskins" seems even further towards the bad end of the spectrum. Maybe that's just me, though. In any case, it's one thing to say that something is suboptimal from a branding perspective, another to say that the government should ban it or some such.

I guess I kind of favor allowing the marketplace of ideas sort this one out. Which is different from saying that I think the name is defensible or legitimate. If someone were to make a parody shirt with Redskins colors and font, depicting a cartoon image of Dan Snyder, and the team name replaced with "Beltway Jews", would that be of a kind with the existing examples?

If not, then we come back to your question of where is the line, and why is it past "Redskin", but not so far out as "Jew"? If yes, then isn't it proof that a spectrum exists, and that Redskins is somewhere on it?

There is a lot of wet sand and moving water between the dry land of "Vikings" or "Celtics", versus the open ocean of minstrel-show-era brands that have been long discontinued by decent people. There is a clear difference between them, but it's not always easy to specify which particular grain of wet sand defines that shoreline, in an absolute and static sense.

Personally, I hate the Redskins and their douche bag owner for entirely different reasons, so I am happy to see them twisting in the wind and making awkward defenses of what is clearly a fairly inappropriate brand name, in 2016. Do I want the PC gestapo to storm in and forcibly rename them? No, but I think those who want to defend the brand have an unwinnable battle, digging in wet sand, to stretch my own analogy.

dbn said:

Fair enough - good response.

Edit to add that Notre Dame's name never bothered me because I've always thought of it in the sense one might refer to a team as the "Fighting Tigers", or even a bit in a complementary way like "the Irish are tough and they'll keep fighting to the end!", but perhaps that is probably being naive?

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I'm half Irish half Scot and I grew up with fighting Irish having the exact connotation you just laid out here. Who knew it was linked to the drinking stereotype. The more you know... Ding ding ding dinnnnnnnnng.

The Price Is Wrong said:

Hey, the Boss gets a pass for the second verse of "Born in the USA".

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Wait, what?

drleather2001 said:

Wait, what?

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HIs brother went and killed the yellow man.

DrewDawg said:

HIs brother went and killed the yellow man.

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Yeah, I know that. But neither Bruce nor the song narrator is using the term in a racist fashion. He/they are mocking the misguided and racist outlook that got the narrator's brother killed in Vietnam.

This whole issue is strange. I mean, teams change their names and/or logos all the time and it isn't a big deal. I liked the Pat the Patriot logo and didn't want it changed, but I lost zero seconds of sleep over it being done anyway. It's ironic - if they had wanted to change the logo to the Flying Elvis because Pat was an ultranationist who supported a ban on muslims, it probably would have been harder to change the logo.

Maybe a better, though much, much more forced analogy would be if Pat was a supporter of the Khmer Rouge and the anti-change Pat crowd pointed to a poll that indicated the majority of the few Cambodians that lived in NE and said they weren't offended. I would (A) wonder how the heck they didn't find it offensive (maybe they just want to fit in and not make waves?), and (B) still not want the team I cheered for to be represented by a Pol Pot supporter.

I wouldn't be surprised if a poll of women in Saudi Arabia found that a majority of them are not offended by the fact that it's against the law for them to drive a car; yet, I'd still think state enforced sexism is a wrong.

(edit to add: I know this line of argument leads some people to feel that progressives are bossy people who think they know what is best for everyone else even if the others don't want their opinions. If someone tells me what diet I should eat or I shouldn't be able to drink alcohol or wear my hair a certain way: sure, that's the doucebag progressive. However, we're talking about a racial slur as a team name. IMO, that's an entirely different playing field (pun!))

dcmissle said:

Fair points all.

But who is the arbiter of this one? Guys like me who have one Native American friend spanning an entire life, and have maybe encountered causally 4 Native Americans?

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I know it's tangential to your point, but, as I mentioned upthread, this is part of the problem why so many people are okay with a native American slur but wouldn't be okay with other slurs.

dcmissle said:

That battle is better fought universally on behalf of all peoples because then, at least, it is coherent and consistent. Otherwise one is left to argue that Native Americans are too pathetic to look out for themselves, or that "Fighting Irish" does not carry negative connotations, and both arguments are pitiable.

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It has always puzzled me that this is such an issue - we've been kind of systematically erasing any logos/teamnames/etc that could be offensive to Native Americans, but the drunk leprechauns abound. There's a feeling in this country that racism and negative stereotyping can only affect disenfranchised minorities, and that's a bit strange to me.

There's an argument I haven't seen in this thread - and it relates to the fighting Irish - its an image that Irish people have in large internalized. Its not offensive because they've owned it and made it their own joke - but its strange to me that its also been culturally accepted outside the group - whereas all the other internalized racial concepts I've seen are very off-limits from people outside the group (the N word, etc).

I've seen similar arguments with some groups of Native Americans preferring to be called Indians because they see "Native American" as an attempt to forget the things that happened, and again take their identity away. Using the term Indian highlights the way they've been treated, and keeps the issue at the forefront.

I do wonder if the reason that Native Americans as a whole (according to study/survey data) don't seem to give a shit about the Redskins name is a variant of the same thing - they just see this whole process as more whitewashing.

Its always been interesting to me too that the Redskins have one of the more tame logos in sports - as far as logos based on Native Americans go. We're not so far removed from stuff like the Cleveland Indians logo.

Hoodie Sleeves said:

We're not so far removed from stuff like the Cleveland Indians logo.

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We're not removed from it at all, they still use it.


They took it off the hat, but they still use a patch and use it in media.

dbn said:

This whole issue is strange. I mean, teams change their names and/or logos all the time and it isn't a big deal.

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Not that this is the rationale behind Snyder's position, but while teams change logos and colors all the time, changing the mascot portion of the name is pretty rare without a relocation involved. I could be wrong, but I believe that since WWII, only the Washington Bullets/Wizards, New Orleans Hornets/Pelicans, and Charlotte Bobcats/Hornets have completely* changed their mascot name. The latter two is something a special circumstance. The former was pretty disastrous.

*Some tweaks include Mighty Ducks > Ducks, Black Hawks > Blackhawks, and Devil Rays > Rays.

Awesome Fossum said:

Not that this is the rationale behind Snyder's position, but while teams change logos and colors all the time, changing the mascot portion of the name is pretty rare without a relocation involved. I could be wrong, but I believe that since WWII, only the Washington Bullets/Wizards, New Orleans Hornets/Pelicans, and Charlotte Bobcats/Hornets have completely* changed their mascot name. The latter two is something a special circumstance. The former was pretty disastrous.

*Some tweaks include Mighty Ducks > Ducks, Black Hawks > Blackhawks, and Devil Rays > Rays.

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Colt .45s > Astros?

Papelbon's Poutine said:

We're not removed from it at all, they still use it.


They took it off the hat, but they still use a patch and use it in media.

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Yikes - they took it off their website, but judging from the pic they used for today's game preview, its back on the hats.

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