Today, I am the 5%. Tomorrow, it’s 1% or bust!
Yips? Is that like Yaws?
I get the impression that 95% of the people who are not offended by Indians/Redskins/etc. make up statistics.
Occupy SDMB!
Yeah, sure you do.
I’m always somewhat bemused by the “You don’t have to be offended” argument. I’ll be sure to offer your valuable explanation to the next person who’s offended by being called a fag or a kike or a wetback, or who complains about caricatures with blackface or something similar. “Just let it roll off your back dude! It’s not really offensive unless you make it offensive.”
I am, at present, unaware of a “widely cast survey” concluding that the term nigger is offensive. And yet i have managed to deduce that some people find it so.
And exactly who would you be surveying here? Do white Americans’ opinions hold equal weight, in your view, with Native Americans on this matter? After all, Native Americans make up less than 1% of the United States population (according to the 2010 census), so even if every single Native American answered that the term or the logo were offensive, it would conveniently fall far short of your arbitrary one-third mark.
Do you believe that we should take into account the actual arguments made by the people who are the subject of the terms here, or is it sufficient for you that non-Indians claim not to be using the team names or logos in an offensive manner? Is “I don’t mean it to be offensive, so you shouldn’t be offended” a reasonable end to this argument, in your opinion?
Whoa, whoa, whoa. Don’t go overboard there, Mr. Social Justice Warrior! “Leaning toward” a slur? What sort of radical commie are you? We’ll call them Redskins whenever we want, and if they don’t like it, they can go back to wherever they came from.
Oh wait. Maybe that won’t work.
You’re about as accurate here as with your analysis of team names and logos. There is, in fact, no game tonight.
Yeah, fuck them for their empathy.
And i guess the frequent protests by actual Native Americans, as well as legislative and legal challenges, over the past decades, are irrelevant, right? I’d ask you the same thing as i asked above: if the Native Americans themselves are, in fact, opposed to the name and/or logo, should that be sufficient? Or should they STFU as long as a sufficient number of non-Native Americans support it?
I don’t see myself as a victim; i am not directly harmed by the name or the logo. It doesn’t cause me personal grief or anguish, or disrupt my existence in any meaningful way. I simply have sufficient brain cells and basic human decency to recognize that some of the nation’s sports team names and logos are relics of an era when the casual demeaning of racial and ethnic minorities was no big deal, and that maybe we should be willing to acknowledge this, especially when changing them would cost so little and yet would also be a significant gesture of recognition and decency.
YMMV. And clearly does.
Possibly apropos of nothing, “Yankees” could be considered derogatory (and in some places I suppose it is). It’s a bastardization of the Dutch name, “Janke”. New York City was originally New Amsterdam, settled by the Dutch.
The origin of the term is still open to dispute.
The Yips.
mhendo
The Washington Post recently commissioned an actual poll (i.e., not an internet survey) of Native Americans. Over 90% said they had no problem with the Redskins name.
This is not a made-up statistic. In fact, the poll results were so surprising that several of the paper’s staff had to consider that the media was blowing this way out of proportion based on the rabble-rousing of a few, who most decidedly do not speak for most Indians. There does seem to be an element of the white offenderati with the attitude of “oh, those poor dumb Indians are too stupid to even realize they’re being offended, so it’s up to us to be offended on their behalf.” In fact, you can see some of that in this very thread.
Ah, just what we needed. A privileged white male to explain to me what I’m allowed to be offended by.
I am offended on my own behalf by the Redskins name. I am offended by Cleveland’s wahoo mascot. While not exactly offended by “Indians”, I think it is a relic of days past that is no longer appropiate as a team name. If you think it’s ok to name teams after historically denigrated classes of people, that’s your opinion. But you don’t get to make the rules about what offends other people.
Did you just assume our race and gender?!?!
Divemaster’s, yes. I can take a guess at yours too, if you were feeling left out.
So looking forward to the game tonight (and hopefully a Cubs win), I was watching the infamous 8th inning of game 6. It’s interesting to watch now, knowing what’s going to happen. The Bartman incident is such a huge deal now, but at the time, things were still going well. Prior was doing fine, up in the count against most of the batters. It was really the error by Gonzalez where it felt like the wheels came off.
It’s a little different scenario tonight. They’ll be lucky to be up 3-0 against Kershaw.
Endless rumors about the possibility of Schwarber joining the team for the World Series run. I don’t think it’s going to happen. They don’t need him as a catcher and he’s a liability in the outfield. Still, the first two games would be with the DH in Cleveland.
Aaannd here we GO!
Already have some action with a double play after the second pitch.
Here’s hoping for a great game.
Sloppy play when it matters most does not give me a good feeling about this.
WTF was up with the firework going off, though?
Good first inning or so for the Cubs. Benefited from a Dodgers error, and then managed to prevent their own error from biting them.
You were saying? 
3-0 Cubs. If this score stays the same into the 8th, people will feel antsy…