On Sunday, President Trump, still on the ropes because of the controversy over the government’s Jeffrey Epstein files, ventured a distraction. With all the usual exclamation points and eccentric capitalization, he sounded the alarm on an issue a reader might have mistaken for a national crisis: the names of professional sports franchises. In particular those franchises that had cast off names that no longer felt culturally appropriate: the Washington Commanders, formerly the Redskins, and the Cleveland Guardians, formerly the Indians.
“The Washington ‘Whatever’s’ should IMMEDIATELY change their name back to the Washington Redskins Football Team. There is a big clamoring for this. Likewise, the Cleveland Indians, one of the six original baseball teams,” — by the way, it wasn’t — “with a storied past. Our great Indian people, in massive numbers, want this to happen. Their heritage and prestige is systematically being taken away from them.”
With typical subtlety, Trump concluded, “OWNERS, GET IT DONE!!!”
The controversy dates back more than a half-century. It was formalized in 1968, when the National Congress of American Indians embarked on a campaign to fight negative stereotypes of native people in American culture.
For a while, however, the evidence on the word “redskin” seemed equivocal. Polls by the Annenberg Public Policy Center, in 2004, and again by The Washington Post, in 2016, reported that a vast majority of actual Native Americans had no problem with the term. Was the whole thing just a politically correct tempest in a teapot, an effort to fix something that wasn’t actually a problem?
In 2020, a new poll was conducted. This one asked respondents for more finely grained responses and gave them more opportunity to consider their answers. The outcome was very different: Almost half of 1,000 Native Americans surveyed indeed found the term “redskin” to be offensive. Organized college athletics had long since forsworn team mascots that were based on caricatures of Indians. Amid the national climate of racial reckoning that George Floyd’s death and the Black Lives Matter movement brought on, the Washington football franchise announced it would change its name.
When Trump claims that “our great Indian people, in massive numbers, want this to happen,” there is no reason to wonder if he commissioned his own secret polling. But you don’t need a poll to understand why he’s wrong.
I doubt even Trump himself would be comfortable using that contested term to address a human being. Imagine him inviting a tribal leader to join him at some White House ceremony and introducing him as “my honored guest, a respected redskin.” At best, the term sounds like an artifact from some century-old stage play. To most ears, it simply sounds like a slur.
My grandmother was a laundress for a very wealthy white family, who would grant their staff a lovely week at their Maine island getaway every summer. Grandmom took us there with her for two summers in the mid-1970s. The white staff members there, while at least outwardly kind to my Black family, were acridly unfond of the local Native Americans. I had occasion to hear them late at night hissing about “those redskins.” That’s what we want as the name of a football team?
But even those who agree with me on that point might still quite reasonably ask what was wrong with “Cleveland Indians.” The term “Native American” may sound more respectful, but a vast majority of people who trace their ancestry to America’s tribal nations prefer being called Indians.
That might seem odd, given that “Indian” was a term imposed on them by Christopher Columbus when he mistakenly thought he had reached India. But it’s not that unusual.
As I wrote recently, quite a few Black Americans prefer “Black” over “African American,” despite the fact that “Black” was a term imposed on people with dark skin by people with light skin, and it sure wasn’t meant as a compliment. At the turn of the previous century, even educated Black people such as Sylvester Russell, an editorialist at the Indianapolis newspaper The Freeman, reportedly approved of the usage of “darkey.” In 1908 the doughty Black opera diva Sissieretta Jones asked, “Is there a soul so insensible that it cannot be stirred to the very depths by the heartbroken cry of the poor old homesick darkey?”
The problem with the Cleveland Indians isn’t “Indian.” The Cleveland Native Americans would be just as wrong. The problem isn’t the word choice; it’s the choice to use a human group as a mascot at all. Even if the members of that group are celebrated as brave warriors. No one today would be debating the merits of a team called the Boston Blacks or the New Jersey Negroes. How about the New York Jews or the Pittsburgh Polacks? Shifting to a more seemly Pittsburgh Poles would do nothing to solve the glaringly obvious problem. People are not pets.
Trump is right that the heritage and prestige of American Indians have been “systematically taken away from them,” but that is the work of the United States government, which pursued an explicit policy of dehumanization and dispossession and achieved it with horrifying success. Going back to antique stereotypes only continues the process.
John McWhorter (@JohnHMcWhorter) is an associate professor of linguistics at Columbia University. He is the author of “Nine Nasty Words: English in the Gutter: Then, Now and Forever” and, most recently, “Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America.” @JohnHMcWhorter
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