The Controversy About the Washington “Redskins”—
A Celebration of White Supremacy, an Ugly Example of Current Culture
January 6, 2014 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
From a reader:
The news recently has been filled with stories about pressure on the Washington “Redskins” professional football team to change its name. Growing numbers are denouncing the name as racist and part of a long, long history of treating the Native American peoples as sub-human. I wanted to share some thoughts on the context for this controversy and a few things it raises about the “mind set” of different groups in this society.
For readers who haven’t followed the controversy, here is some background:
George Preston Marshall, the original owner of the team when it was first organized back in 1932, claimed he came up with the name because he wanted to “honor” native people. Team fans are encouraged to cover their faces with “war paint” and do “war chants” that turn the American Indians into cartoon characters.
Marshall was without a doubt a big-time racist. For example, when he got married in 1936, he hired Black people to serve food dressed like the household servants from the days before the abolition of slavery and sing songs that glorified those slave-owning days. Marshall was the last professional football team owner to integrate his team and allow Black athletes to play—the National Football League banned Black players in 1933 (apparently Marshall was the main person behind the ban) and didn’t lift it until 1946, but Marshall held out for another 16 years before finally signing a Black player in 1962.
And then there’s the name of the team itself. “Redskins” is nothing but a bigoted and derogatory term that has been used against the native peoples for centuries. Think John Wayne movies and stories about the “savage Redskins” being hunted down by “brave cavalry soldiers”—in real life, those soldiers massacred whole villages, then herded the survivors onto reservations in some of the most desolate parts of the country where they were half-starved and randomly murdered for any sign of resistance. Or think about scalping, an obscenity created by bounty hunters to prove how many native people they’d killed by slicing the hair and skin off their skulls and then bringing the scalps in to collect their financial reward.
“Honor” native people? Many have asked, what if the team was called the Washington “Darkies” in order to “honor” Black people, or the “Wetbacks” to “honor” Mexican and other Latino immigrants? Or maybe the Washington “Gooks” to “honor” the three million peasants and others in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos that the U.S. military murdered during the Vietnam War during the 1960s and 1970s?
The fact that this name is so acceptable to millions of Americans who don’t even think twice about what it means is a sign of how callous the culture has become. Far too many people go along with this, saying, “It’s just a name, for god’s sake,” and they end up complicit in covering over the real history of this country. So what if whole sections of people “aren’t bothered” by the name. What does that say about the culture of this country? It’s like pointing to backward men who laugh at rape “jokes” and saying that proves there’s nothing wrong with rape.
Recently the owner of the Washington team tried to defend the name by bringing four tribal members of the Navajo “Code Talkers” onto the field, at least some of whom said they had no problem with the name. The Code Talkers were members of the Navajo and other native tribes who served in the U.S. military in the Pacific in World War 2 and transmitted using their tribal languages. The Japanese military troops were never able to understand what was being said, and it gave American troops a real advantage.
For the context of all this, consider a few things about the Code Talkers:
First, the men who did this in World War 2 may have genuinely believed that they were on the side of the “good guys,” but American military aims in the Pacific objectively were nothing but an attempt to replace the colonial domination of Japanese (as well as British, French and other “allied” powers) imperialism with American neo-colonial domination. Think about the fact that after American forces “liberated” many island chains in the Pacific during the war, they used their new dominance to test nuclear weapons in those islands without any concern about what the radioactive fallout did to whole populations in the area. Many of those island chains are still uninhabitable half a century later.
Second, the Code Talkers and other forces are regularly pointed to as examples of the “warrior spirit” among native peoples. The U.S. military regularly appeals to this to convince huge numbers of native youth that they can “honor their ancestry” by joining the Marines or the Army—the very forces that massacred their ancestors in the past, and are now used to massacre other oppressed people around the globe. Think what it means that the military capitalizes on this “warrior spirit” idea by naming their weapons of war after native peoples, like the “Apache” or “Blackhawk” helicopters or the “Tomahawk” cruise missiles.
(By the way, the current president of the Code Talkers Association and one of the people on the field to defend the “Redskins” name is Peter McDonald. He was chairman of the Navajo Nation in the Arizona/New Mexico area in the 1970s and 1980s and was notorious for selling out the mineral and timber interests of the tribe to enrich himself and his supporters while most tribal members were still without electricity or running water, and for working hand-in-hand with the FBI to repress activists from the American Indian Movement who were protesting the conditions of native people. I don’t think McDonald represents the thinking of all of the remaining Code Talkers or their relatives, but it’s indicative of the way the Code Talkers are used today that such a backward force fits right in.)
And third, this whole notion of collaborating with and joining the U.S. military to murder and terrorize other oppressed people is hardly limited to the Native Americans. For example, Bob Avakian talks in his speech Revolution—NOTHING LESS! about the Buffalo Soldiers—Black troops that fought heroically to end slavery during the Civil War but then stayed in the army and went west as “Indian fighters” to help complete the conquest of native peoples resisting U.S. westward expansion.
Nobody with an ounce of humanity and a desire to see a world free from oppression and suffering can stand on the sidelines of this controversy. “Redskins” is a shameful and disgusting example of racist America. It’s long past time for the name to be abolished, and for the whole backward culture it symbolizes to be abolished with it.
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