Photo by Fred King
In February, the Washington football team decided to respond to a discussion about the racist overtones of its nickname by offering the lame defense that because a bunch of high schools around the country also use it, it must be acceptable.
Like most rational people, we found that argument to be cheap and trollish. Turns out, it was also exaggerated. In its initial press release, the team claimed 70 school districts around the United States share its name. In fact, the number is 62, and dropping.
Capital News Service did an exhaustive survey of U.S. high schools that share the on-field moniker of the Washington football team and found that while most of them have no current plans to change their name, many have at least had a discussion about the its nature. Moreover, Capital News Service also found that 28 high schools around the country have already replaced the name.
The most of those schools was Cooperstown High School in Central New York, which dropped the Washington football team’s name after meetings with student, parents, and the local school board.
Still, Capital News Service did find plenty of schools that side with the Washington football team’s argument, that the name invokes honor and respect rather than a racial slur:
In Ohio, Indian Creek High School ‒ a majority white school – principal Steve Cowser said there has never been pressure to change the name Redskins, which the school adopted in 1993.
For him, the term represents honor and respect.
“I understand what happened in the past and why the word Redskins was given to them by the white man,” he said. “[But] in today’s society, when we use the name Redskins, we are honoring the Indians for their heroic efforts.”
At Ringgold High School, a majority black school in Louisiana, Principal Eric Carter said there has also been no community pressure to remove the name Redskins.
“If you show that your voice is in the majority then there would be some consideration,” Carter said, when asked how he would respond to a name change proposal.
The report also found three high schools with majority Native American enrollments where the team name is used. “Being from Native American culture, [the term] is not derogatory,” the principal of high school on a Navajo reservation in Arizona said.
But the report also finds that while name changes are met with resistance in some school districts, many of them are embraced. “The transition has been really easy,” said a student at a high school in Maine that dropped the name last year.
