According to a new poll out, the vast majority of Native Americans (90%) are not offended by the Washington NFL team being called “Redskins” and many actually like the name. Of note, the numbers are said to be consistent with a prior poll taken in 2004, meaning that Native Americans have not been moved by the massive publicity for a campaign to ban the name as offensive to them.
What’s even more remarkable IMO is that apparently a far greater number of non-NA people find the name offensive to NA than of NA themselves - 23% of the general public called for the name to be banned in a 2014 ESPN poll versus 9% of NA who say they are offended by it now. (The numbers can’t be directly compared, because they are from different polls, but a difference of that magnitude is still telling.)
Now in theory, you could adopt a position which maintains that even if any tiny percentage of a group object to a name, it’s offensive. And part of the problem is that there are some NA activists who have asserted that it’s offensive to NA, and some supporters may have just taken this assertion at face value. (In the linked WP article, they say some NA expressed resentment at these activists for speaking on their behalf.) But ISTM that this is primarily an example of offenderati looking to find offensive things to fight against, and making a huge upheaval over something that on balance wasn’t really offensive to those whose opinion actually counts.
“Native Americans are resilient and have not allowed the NFL’s decades-long denigration of us to define our own self-image,” wrote Oneida Nation Representative Ray Halbritter and National Congress of American Indians Executive Director Jackie Pata. “However, that proud resilience does not give the NFL a license to continue marketing, promoting, and profiting off of a dictionary-defined racial slur — one that tells people outside of our community to view us as mascots.”
This is a classic textbook example of paternalism. This author may think that Native Americans do not realize how they are being harmed by the name “Redskins”, so they need a valiant Social Justice Warrior to come in and rescue them from their own ignorance or stupidity.
If people don’t want your “help”, and they are not in immediate mortal danger, dude, you are being a third wheel. Why not go get to know some real Native Americans and see what sort of problems they face on a day-to-day basis, such as rampant alcoholism and domestic violence?
To be fair, those guys themselves are apparently Native Americans. I don’t know if you can tell them they need to “go get to know some real Native Americans”.
The math seems challenging here. They found about 500 Native Americans to ask this question. Native Americans are less than 1% of the population, so to randomly get 500 to ask this question, they would have to have randomly polled over 50,000 people. I can’t find anywhere that they say how many people were ultimately surveyed to get to these 504.
My guess is that they didn’t poll nearly that many people, but that they got a much higher hit rate than the predicted 1% because a lot of people who identify themselves as Native American are full of shit.
You seem to be assuming that Native Americans are randomly distributed throughout the population, but that assumption is erroneous. For example, a survey done on a Native American reservation would yield mostly Native Americans, and there are probably a lot of other areas which have high concentrations.
It’s common for pollsters to survey small sub-populations and they generally don’t involve calling up millions of people to get at the small population they want. This particular poll seems unremarkable in that respect.
I’d say when that name is a term that is meant to demean and cause offense, it’s offensive. So what if I’m not Native American? I find the name embarrassing, because it’s another example of my people, White people, acting like they can do whatever they want, and that others (yes, even 10 percent of a smallish group) don’t matter as much as their football team. Now, as a non-football fan, it’s pretty far off my radar, and I’m hardly going to fight about it, but yeah, I think it should be changed.
I’ve never done an official poll, but I asked a few people I knew if they’d ever heard the term “Wop”, because I hadn’t until a few years ago. Most people I asked hadn’t. If I named a local team the Wops, a vast majority of younger people wouldn’t get it. A few older people would, but wouldn’t care. A small percentage would be offended. But, even if no one were offended, I’d consider it wrong, because the word is, in and of itself, meant to cause harm.
*The survey was conducted in conjunction with weekly national surveys of U.S. adults reached through a random sample of cellular and landline telephones conducted by Social Science Research Solutions of Media, Pa. Toward the end of a survey on a range of topics, respondents who identified their race as Native American were asked a series of questions on views of the Redskins team name and Native American imagery in sports. *
Reads to me that they had some other surveying going on, and they then asked if the subject was Native American and pulled up 500, which would, again, require surveying 50,000 people. Maybe they did, but that would be an impressively large sample, and they don’t tell me what the number is.
I married into an Indian family, and have over the years become amused at how many white people “identify” as Indian and would have so identified in this sort of survey.
Question then is if “in conjunction with” is the same thing as “as part of”. Meaning, it’s possible that they had a specific sub-survey more targeted at a NA population.
It’s not clear that the results would vary between people who “identify” as NA and people who actually are. Based on the way the results were broken down in the survey, it does not seem like the level of NA heritage made a big difference (e.g. living on reservations versus not, etc.)
I can say as a white dude, if a team was named the Georgia Crackers or something I would find it very weird, but I wouldn’t be personally offended by it. I would still think that they should change their name, which is a question that curiously the poll didn’t ask.
It’s made very clear that this was a random sample not enriched for Native Americans:
“weekly national surveys of U.S. adults reached through a random sample of cellular and landline telephones”
Again, maybe they really did survey 50,000 people. But, my guess is that they surveyed much, much fewer, but had a much, much higher than expected hit rate for Native Americans.
Yeah, those numbers don’t add up either. 75% of their 504 Native Americans live on or near a reservation. That’s completely out of whack with the number that live on reservations which is closer to 20%. 44% of their 504 Native Americans claim to be enrolled in a tribe, which is considerably lower than reported numbers. So, they either have an impressively disproportionate number of self identified Native Americans who are living on a reservation while not enrolled in any tribe or they have people who are pretending to be Native American for the purposes of a survey.
While I’m at it, 44% of their 504 Native Americans apparently make more than 100K per year. That’s not in line with any existing data on Native Americans. I think that alone proves that a significant number of their “Native Americans” are lying about either their income, their heritage or both.
Seconded – I’m not personally offended by the name either, and I don’t think they should change it just because it might be offensive to some. I think they should change it (voluntarily, not by government action) because it’s an ethnic slur, and I think it’s being a jerk to use ethnic slurs (and especially name a commercial enterprise and make money off of an ethnic slur).
Where does the OP live? Is he a died-in-the-wool Redskins fan who will feel real pain if his beloved team is forced to change its name? Think of all that tradition!
Or is he getting offended on behalf of those fans?
I don’t know why people love to pretend to be Indian, but they do. It’s somehow more exciting.
I’m not saying that I know for a fact that their data is flawed, but their hit rate seems very, very high for any reasonably sized survey. Without that size, it’s impossible to know what their hit rate was.
Previous surveys have been criticized for not establishing the Native American credentials of the respondents. As as been discussed elsewhere on this board there are many people who claim and/or believe they have some NA ancestry but do not, or at least do not really know if they do.
Aside from that I have asked this question of several people who I found credible in their claim to be Native Americans, and none of them voiced objections to the term ‘Redskins’. At the same time I have also heard that there may be a Native American cultural attitude to be non-confrontational about such a question and perhaps there is more to it than that.
Either way, even though I don’t see that the name in and of itself has to be considered offensive, I was very dismayed to see on TV some coverage of this topic and showed Washington fans dressing in plastic headdresses, carrying toy bows and arrows, and otherwise acting in a way that is somewhat offensive based on the name. This saddens me because I was born in Washington DC and have been a lifelong fan of the team (in the sense that for some reason I feel as if I have to stick by my original home team despite their shameful history of racism in another area, and their consistently bad performance).
The team and it’s dimwit owner have screwed this up. It’s not worth the fight, just change the stupid name now.