As a website devoted to chronicling the things that interest readers in and around Washington, D.C., DCist tries to include as much coverage of the local professional sports franchises as possible. And the sporting scene here offers something every day, be it the emergence of the Washington Nationals as a dominant force in Major League Baseball, the rabid enthusiasm that surrounds D.C. United, the fitful trials of the Washington Wizards, or the post-lockout stuttering of the Washington Capitals.
Then there is the National Football League’s Washington franchise. You can probably tell from that sentence where this is going. But in recent weeks, as debate over the team’s actual name and logo has intensified, that conversation has grown to include whether the publications that report on the team should make a stand against a blatantly racist name.
For a few years, the Kansas City Star has referred to the Washington NFL team as such. Last year, Washington City Paper held a “re-naming” contest and settled on “Pigskins.” Around that same time, DCist, unannounced, started using the shorthand “‘Skins” as a means of dancing around the official title. It’s not the first time this website has teased the team about its name; in March 2011, after the team threatened to sue The Washington Post because the paper’s pro football blog included the team’s name followed by the word “Insider,” we responded in support of Post by referring to the team as the “R*******.” (The Post’s other sports blogs—Nationals Journal, Wizards Insider, and Capitals Insider—exist with no known acrimony from the respective franchises they cover.)
But in reality, the football team’s name continues to be out there. Last week, at a Smithsonian event in which panels of academics, activists, and journalists debated the impact of the use of Native American imagery and nicknames in professional sports, the Post’s Mike Wise and USA Today’s Erik Brady were unsparing in their criticism of the Washington football team’s name, and made no secret of their discomfort of sometimes having to write it in their columns. Meanwhile, two of Wise’s colleagues in Metro—Courtland Milloy and Robert McCartney—have written in the past week that it is long past time for the local NFL squad to change its branding. The Post’s ombudsman, Patrick Pexton, joined that chorus yesterday.
Unfortunately, as Wise said at the National Museum of the American Indian last week, the only way team owner Dan Snyder will even consider authorizing a name change is if the team’s financial success hinges on such an action. “If one athlete can kick Dan Snyder in the pocketbook, I believe he will begin to look at the issue differently,” he said.
No athletes so far have stepped up, but the ranks of journalists obligated to cover the team and begrudgingly acknowledge its official name is getting more vocal. Last Friday, on his most impassioned commentary on the topic yet, NBC4’s Jim Vance spared nothing in calling the team’s name “vulgar”:
“Back in the day, if you really wanted to insult a black man and attack a Jew, an Irishman, and probably start a fight, you threw out certain words. You know what they are. They were and they are pejoratives of the first order, the worst order, specifically intended to injure. In my view, ‘Redskin’ was, and is, in that same category.”
Vance’s full commentary is worth the time.
An item that appears today on the team’s website suggests that it has heard some of the recent criticism. However, the response is even more insulting. The team reacted with a blog post titled “‘We Are Very Proud To Be Called Redskins’,” which features coaches and former players of several high-school teams around the country that borrow the team’s name.
It’s not uncommon for youth sports teams to use the names of big-league franchises. It boosts morale and makes it easier to follow along. Here’s some of what the local NFL team’s publicity department found about that:
“We are very proud of our athletic teams and very proud to be called Redskins!”
These are the words of Coshocton High School athletic director George Hemming, who serves as the athletic director for just one of the 70 different High Schools in 25 states are known as the Redskins.
Redskins.com found that there are almost as many schools using the name Redskins as Cowboys, as only 75 schools use the name Cowboys, and interestingly just 19 use the name Giants.
Coshocton High School is located in east central Ohio which has a rich Native American history. Hemming said “the name represents to us competition and pride.”
Hemming and the parents of Coshocton High School athletes may be bursting with pride, but who’s to say they couldn’t get behind Giants or Raiders or Warriors or, heck, even Cowboys. So-called “America’s Team” might be deeply loathsome, but they’re not racist.
But this isn’t about a high school in the middle of Ohio. This is about a professional franchise that plays up the road in Landover, Md. practices down the road in Ashburn, Va., and represents a region of 5 million people in the biggest professional sports league in the country. And with this blog post, the Washington professional football team is trolling us. We are being taunted with the fact that even though its name is distasteful, vulgar, and racist, it must be OK because some high schools have adopted it. Please.
So, DCist is taking a step it should have taken months—maybe years—ago and will now start referring to the Washington football team as precisely that, or some variation. It is of course possible that the franchise’s actual name will appear in a direct quote, but as long as we have control over the prose, it won’t appear here. Same goes for the shorthand cop-out we have been using.
As Vance said at the end of his segment last Friday, “the name sucks. We need to get rid of it.” This is the least we can do.
