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“Two pro football Hall of Famers and Washington Redskins legends joined in on the Redskins name debate on Tuesday morning.
Darrell Green and Art Monk, who played a combined 34 seasons with the Redskins, spoke with WTOP radio in Washington D.C. and said that the organization should consider changing the team name.
“[If] Native Americans feel like Redskins or the Chiefs or [another] name is offensive to them, then who are we to say to them ‘No, it’s not’?” Monk said. Green agreed, saying “it deserves and warrants conversation because somebody is saying, ‘Hey, this offends me,’ and then you have a conversation.”
Monk and Green’s opinions are vastly different from former Redskins star and Hall of Famer, Joe Theismann, who weighed in on the name controversy back in June.
“I was very proud to play for the Washington Redskins, and I did it to honor native people in that regard. I think sometimes people perceive words in their own particular way,” Theismann said, via D.C. Sports Bog. “What happens, what Mr. Snyder decides to do is totally up to him. I can just tell you that when I put that uniform on, and I put that helmet on with the Redskin logo on it, I felt like I was representing more than the Washington Redskins. I was representing the great Native American nations that exist in this country.””
– Mother Jones, Darrell Green, Art Monk Discuss Redskins Name Controversy.
“For decades, American Indian activists and others have been asking, urging, and haranguing the Washington Redskins to ditch their nickname, calling it a racist slur and an insult to Indians. They have collected historical and cultural examples of the use of redskin as a pejorative and twice sued to void the Redskins trademark, arguing that the name cannot be legally protected because it’s a slur. (A ruling on the second suit is expected soon; the first failed for technical reasons.) A group in the House of Representatives also recently introduced a bill to void the trademark. The team has been criticized from every different direction, by every kind of person. More than 20 years ago, Washington Post columnist Tony Kornheiser, no politically correct squish, urged the team to abandon the name. Today, the mayor of Washington, D.C.—the mayor!—goes out of his way to avoid saying the team’s name.
Why, then, has nothing changed? Because the choice of the team’s name belongs to one person, Washington owner Daniel Snyder. He has brushed off the controversy with arm waves at “tradition,” “competitiveness,” and “honor.” He recently told USA Today, “We’ll never change the name. It’s that simple. NEVER—you can use caps.” Earlier this year, some Redskins flunky was assigned the job of locating high school teams around the country called Redskins, and found 70 of them, which proved very little except that the Redskins are capable of spreading a bad example to the young. (A Google search of “Redskins” “nickname” and “high school” turns up story after story of schools dropping the nickname.) And this May, the team pathetically trotted out a guy named Chief Dodson to explain that his people were “quite honored” by the Redskins name. NFL commissioner Roger Goodell cited Dodson’s support in a letter to the Congressional Native American Caucus, apparently not realizing that the supposedly Redskins-loving Dodson wasn’t a real chief.”
– Huffington Post, The Washington _________.
“It is an absolute embarrassment—for the NFL, for the nation’s capital, and for nanny-underpayer/owner Dan Snyder, who has stubbornly vowed never to change the team’s name, even in the face of common decency and a federal trademark suit.
And so, in an admittedly small gesture, Mother Jones is also tweaking our house style guide, joining Slate and a group of other publications, from The New Republic to Washington City Paper. From here on out, we will refer to the team online and in print as “Washington” or “Washington’s pro football team” or, if we get sassy, “the Washington [Redacted].””
– Mother Jones, Ditching the Redskins, Once and for All.
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Indian Country 52
Indian Country 52 is a weekly project by David Bernie that uses the medium of posters that promote issues and stories in Indian Country.
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This work by David Bernie is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. You may download, share, and post the images under the condition that the works are attributed to the artist.
