A Linguist on Why "Redskins" Is Racist (2024)

The thing to bear in mind about the Redskins trademarkcase is that it was basically about the‘60s—and the ‘60s of Mad Men, not Woodstock.

Whatever the connotations of “redskin” now, the question facing the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board was whether it was disparaging when theteam firstregistered it as a trademark in 1967. Ifthat was so, theregistration would have fallen afoul of the provision of the Lanham Act that disallowsthe registration of trademarksthat may disparage the members of a group. You have the right to pick a slur for your product name, the thinking goes, but you can’t expect the government to protect your exclusive use of it by restricting the speech of others.

That was the argument of the petitionerswho first asked the US Trademark Office to cancelthe mark in 1995, initiating a legal process that would wind up 19 years and two trials later in last week’s decision that the mark should be canceled, which is where things stand pending appeal. But the historical perspective made things more difficult for the petitioners, and for me, as their linguistics expert. How do you determine what theconnotations of a word were back in the ‘60s?

That may not have been so terribly long ago, but the racial attitudes of that era can strike us as primordial. What should we make of the fact that before the mark’s registration, no dictionaries labeled “redskin” as offensive, the way they did slurs for blacks and Jews? Infact it was only in 1967 that the Random House Dictionary became the first to provide such a label, and more than a decade went bybeforeany others followed suit.

The team’s attorneys and linguistics experts argued thatthis demonstrated that the term had neverreally been disparaging—just a “robust informal synonym” for “American Indian,” which dictionaries only started to label as offensive in response topoliticalpressure from a few Indianactivists.But lexicographers are creatures of their age, and before the ‘60s members of the dominant culture were selective in their sensitivities. Merriam-Webster’s monumentalThird International, published in 1961, warned its readers off“nigg*r,” “chink,” and “kike,” but it didn’t feel the need to indicate that some people might also takeoffense at “white trash,”“gook,” “wetback,” “pansy” and “fa*g.” Not that those words hadn’t been derogatory or demeaning all along. It’s just that lexicographers and most everyone else weren’t capable of imagining how those words would land on the people they targeted.

“Redskin,” too, has been derogatory for a long time. It was recently discovered that the word actually began its life in English 200 years ago as a translation of an Indian term, via French—it didn’t have anything to do with those stories about bounties for bloody Indian scalps. But then “nigg*r” had a benign origin, as well. Since the mid-19th century “redskin” has simply been the slang word the white man used for the Indian, and like all slang words, it was infused with the attitudes about the thing it names. In the passages from books and newspapers and the movie clips we provided the court to document the word’s history, the word is inevitably associated with contempt, derision, condescension, or sentimental paeans to the noble savage. It couldn’t have been otherwise—what other attitudes were out there?

That all started to change in the ‘60s, though it took dictionaries a while to catch up. The sea change in socialattitudes that led to the civil rightsacts of 1964 and 1965 also transformed the way we talked about race and ethnicity. That was when we collectively acknowledged that every group was entitled to control its own linguistic destiny, and decide what it should and shouldn’tbe called—that groups had the right to define themselves.

The principle had far-reaching consequences. When the decade opened, liberal-minded people referred to Negroes (or to “the Negro,” as LBJ liked to say), while an unreconstructed rear guard still talked about “coloreds.” Bythe decade’s end, pretty much everybody was using “blacks.” Over the following decades Orientals became Asians, queers becamegays, and the new terms “Latino,” “Hispanic,”and “Chicano” were added to the vocabulary. And the old word “slur” acquired a new meaning to refer to a word that conveyed an ethnic or racial insult, one whose use was not just unkind, but as a social thought crime. Not even the vocal reactions against“politicalcorrectness” in later decades called the right of self-naming into serious question. Those on the cultural right may ridicule PC ideas about race and gender, but in their public discussions they’re as fastidious asanybody else aboutavoiding words that are regarded as offensive or simply outmoded.

There are exceptions to that pattern, but “redskin” isn’t among them. By the 1970s, the word was widely considered as a slur. All modern dictionaries label it as offensive or disparaging, just at they do the N-word—no journalist would begin a story, “Redskin astronaut John Herrington was honored last night…” Not all Indians object to the word, it’s true. In surveys, it’s offensive to 35 to 45 percent of Indians enrolled in tribes, but far fewer among the much larger—and rapidly growing—population who self-identify as Indians, many out of a spiritual affinity or a family legend about a Cherokee princess four generations back. Whatever the exact number, it offends enough people to put it off limits as a form of address. Any white person who uses the word injudiciously to a group of Indians can count on receiving a sufficient quota of angry stares.

Even the defenders of the team’s name don’t deny that it’s a personal slur. When NFL commissioner Roger Goodell was asked whether he’d address a Native American as a redskin to his face, he sidestepped the question, replying, “This is the name of a football team.” So did the team’s trademark attorney Bob Raskopf—“That’s not what this case is about. It’s what our word means. You need to put the word in context.”

But when it comes to slurs, “context” isn’t adecontaminant. You assume Raskopf wouldn’t have offered that argument on behalf of a team called the Washington Spearchuckers, however storied its history. But the team argues that their use of “redskin” is really is a separate item that’s free of the stigma that attaches to the word in other settings—it’s “our word,” as Raskopf says—which they’ve always meant purely as an honorific. As the team’s president Bruce Allen puts it, their use of the name “has always been respectful of and shown reverence toward the proud legacy and traditions of Native Americans.”

That line of defense oscillates between the disingenuous and the obtuse. Start with the “tribute” business. Team names can be genuine tributes when they refer to a constituency the team can claim to represent—you think of the Steelers or the Ragin’ Cajuns. But names like Redskin aren’t honoring anybody or anything. They’re meant to evoke people and things known for their savagery or inhumanity—wild beasts, destructive forces of nature, brigands and bandits, ancient warriors, and other assorted malignant beings. The New Jersey NHL team didn’t call themselves the Devils in order to do honor to the Prince of Darkness.

In modern times, of course, the point of those names isn’t to actually terrify opponents so much as to create spectacle and to sell gear with cool logos. As the historian J. Gordon Hylton recounts, the Redskins’ founder George Preston Marshall deserves a lot of the credit for inventing modern mascot pageantry. Marshall was an unapologetic racist of the old school—he was the last NFL owner to integrate his team, and then only under threat of losing his stadium—and it isn’t surprising that he made the name the occasion for a kind of minstrelsy in redface, complete with marching bands in headdresses, cheerleaders in Indian costumes, and a halftime show featuring a leggy Indian maiden dancing with someone dressed as a horse. Marshall even had his players take the field wearing war paint while the coach stood on the sidelines in a Sioux headdress.

Some of the more buffoonish features of those spectacles were retired over the coming decades; by the 1980s, the lyrics of the team’s fight song, written by Marshall himself, no longer contained the line “Scalp ‘um, swamp ‘um, we will take’um big score….” But the plot hasn’t changed: The song still begins with an apostrophe to “braves on the warpath.”

“We cannot ignore our 81-year history,” the team’s owner Dan Snyder insists, and neither should anyone else. It takes a certain audacity to be able to say with a straight face that those spectacles showed “reverence toward the proud legacy and traditions of Native Americans.” Actually, they don’t have anything to do with “Native Americans” at all. The whole reason for introducing that term in the 1960s was to find a supplement for “American Indian” that described the indigenous peoples as they actually were and had been, without invidious stereotypes. But “redskin” conjures up a purely mythical race, as fabulous and as defunct as the Spartans, the buccaneers, and the Vikings. Marshall’s redskins were burlesques of the war bonnet savages of the movies, which were the only Indians the fans of those Eastern city teams were apt to have seen

Not much has changed since then in the way Indian mascots are regarded. Modern cinematic representations of Indians may be more thoughtful and nuanced than they once were, but sports fans don't show any sign of adjusting their stereotypes accordingly. You think of the Atlanta Braves’ fans tomahawk chop and the war chant drawn from the motif that announced the arrival of redskins in every Hollywood Western. This isn’t just about movie Indians, but old movie Indians.

To a greater or lesser degree, the casual denigration of Native Americans sullies all the professional sports teams with Indian mascots, including the Braves, the Kansas City Chiefs, and the Cleveland Indians. But only the Washington team incorporates that denigration in its very name. When you a pronounce a slur, you affiliate yourself with the attitudes and actions of all the people who have used it before you, whatever your personal feelings about the group it refers to. There’s no exemption for good intentions, or even for ignorance. “nigg*r” stings even in the mouth of a child who doesn’t know it’s offensive.

The historical overtones of “redskin” may be faint to mostAmericans, but they’re still audiblewhenever it’ssaid. Indians themselves sometimesuse the word in team names as a reclaimed epithet, but that dispensationdoesn’t extend to whites, no more than the appearanceof the N-word in hip hop lyrics gives whitespermission to useitit.If it’s a slur when you say it to an American Indian’s face,it’s a slur when you sing itwith 80 thousand other fans.Of all the things that defenders of the namehave said, there’s nothing to touch theeffrontery of Raskopf’s assertion “Thisis ourword”—as if the team had the power to pluck the wordout ofhistory, both theirs and its own, and oblige everyone, Indians included, to honortheirmeaning of theword.

I understand why fans get irritated when someone suggests that there’s anything racist in Indian team names and the spectacle and behavior that they give rise to. The tomahawk chop, the war bonnets and war drums, the chants—it’s just people having fun, in the great American tradition of playing Indian. Since the time of the Boston Tea Party, after all, “acting like a wild Indian” has been the characteristic expression of the unbridled American id.

But everything changes when you come to realize that Redskins is genuinely offensive to some. A lot of fans react by getting defensive, decrying the whining oversensitivity of the complainers, railing about PC and the thought police. At that point, though, the game is already up. Once that testy or belligerent note creeps into the chants and songs, they can’t be innocent fun anymore. Best give it up, so the conversation can return to football.

As Terry Bradshaw puts it, “Finally I’ve given it some thought, and if it’s really offending people … Everybody loves the Washington Redskins but they can be the Washington something else.” This was never about PC, just manners.