The New N-Word

Rae Williams is  a Master’s Student at the Philip Merrill College of Journalism.

If you’ve ever been called a racial slur to your face, like I have, you’ll easily understand the trouble the American Indians have with the current name of Washington’s professional football team. 

If you haven’t had the distinct horror of someone screaming a slur at you, then you may never be able to fully grasp the atrocity of having a million people wear that slur on their backs as they drag stereotyped symbols of your ethnicity through the mud on a Monday night, in front of a crowd of misguided and often innocent, but ignorant fans, in the name of millions of dollars in football.

As dramatic as it may sound, that is the magnitude of this name, to the individuals who are offended by it.

There are several arguments to leaving the name as it is: ‘Not all American Indians find the term offensive’, ‘it’s an honor’, and ‘it’s just a name.’

I question why 100 percent of a population should have to be in agreement to have their voice heard, when in this country it only takes 51 percent of a vote to put a president in office, and the slightest majority of a jury to convict a man of murder.

Yes, the head of the Navajo Nation has sat with Dan Snyder in the same way that blacks sold fellow blacks away to the slave ships.  Internal discord in the population does not devalue the message.  We can’t use that as an excuse to make it okay.

But let’s pretend, just for a moment, that we’ve replaced ‘redskins’ with ‘niggers,’ ‘dykes,’ ‘crackers,’ or ‘kikes’.  At one point these names were all commonplace and perhaps some not always as offensive as they are now. 

The marginalized people those names belonged to demanded more respect and fought (and are still fighting) to be recognized as equals, and those names became widely knows as slurs.

Black people have come from niggers, to Negroes, to colored, to African-American and black, as their rights have evolved, in the same way that internally the name redskins may once have been accepted but is now evolving as the nation the ‘new’ Americans attempted to wipe out builds itself back.

Indeed, the R-word is the new N-word, and the mascot is the new blackface.  Different set of disenfranched people, new nomenclature, same sad story, and a question: why haven’t we learned our lesson?

Tara Houska, a member of the Couchiching tribe started an organization called “Not Your Mascot” to oppose the team’s use of the name.

“It’s offensive,” Houska repeated several times during a panel discussion about the topic Monday night at the University of Maryland.  “You dress up as us.” 

Houska said that while within their reservations, certain speech was accepted, when outsiders used it, it was usually derogatory and never appropriate. “People like to say it’s to honor us.  I don’t feel honored.” 

Their people have made it clear – It’s not an honor.  They’ve also made it clear that ignorance doesn’t make you exempt from racism and it’s definitely not just a name.

Also at the panel, a Native American father of two young children spoke of the hostility his children have encountered as a result of the name.

I’ve coached my daughter not to talk about it at school because we know how the team’s super fans can be, he said.

The truth is that the name can often breed hostility, especially for die-hard fans who take the name and mascot off the field and apply it to the population it’s connected to.

Wearing headdresses, which have been traditionally worn on important occasions by some Native Americans who have worked to earn each feather, is not a form of flattery.  We haven’t earned the feathers, they’re not ours to wear.

We also run the risk of the name building resentment among the Native Indian population.

Fifty years later, my mixed Black and Native American stepfather still fights bitterness everyday, stemming from being called the N-word shortly after segregation ended and he was finally able to drink from the same water fountain as the white kids.

Yes, segregation ended just over 50 years ago.  Yes, a slur targeted at him as a child still hurts.

As a journalist, I commit to not using a name that a race has defined as pejorative.  Even if I didn’t agree with their reasoning, out of basic respect for another human being, I could not continue.

USA TODAY columnist Christine Brennan has refrained from using the word despite being the team’s beat writer for the Washington Post for a few years in the 1980s.

“It will change; there is no doubt about that. This is the way history marches, and then our society moves forward,” Brennan said of the name.