“The argument has always been the same,” Harjo said. “‘We are honoring you,’ they say. ‘No, you’re not,’ we reply. ‘Shut up,’ they say. That’s pretty much the divide for 17 years.”

The Redskins can claim the name is not meant to be offensive, but consider this.  It was chosen by their first owner, George Preston Marshall, a virulent racist who pushed to segregate the NFL for a decade (from 1934 to 1945) and refused to sign black players to the Redskins until 1962, when he was forced to by the federal government.  According to Wikipedia:

[Marshall] is best known for his intractable opposition to having African-Americans on his roster. According to professor Charles Ross, “For 24 years Marshall was identified as the leading racist in the NFL”. Though the league had previously had a sprinkling of black players, blacks were excluded from all NFL teams just one year after Marshall entered the league.  Ross asserts that Marshall propelled the NFL to institute a “color barrier” akin to that of its baseball brethren. …

While the rest of the league began signing individual blacks in 1946 and actually drafting blacks in 1949, Marshall held out until 1962 before signing a black player. Moreover, the signing only came when Interior Secretary Stewart Udall issued an ultimatum – unless Marshall signed a black player, the government would revoke the Redskins’ 30-year lease on the year-old D.C. Stadium (now Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Stadium), which had been paid for by government money and was owned by the Washington city government…

The flipside of this argument is that Marshall picked the name Redskins to honor the team’s Native American coach William “Lone Star” Dietz, and thus the name was not originally meant to be offensive.  Bill Poser, writing for a University of Pennsylvania’s blog on linguistics, argues:

I think that it is well established that redskin is taken by most people today to be disparaging. What is more interesting is whether it has always been so, as Harjo et al., as well as various others, claim. One interesting piece of evidence is the origin of the name Washington Redskins. In 1933, George Preston Marshall, the owner of the team, which was then located in Boston, renamed it the Boston Redskins in honor of the head coach, William “Lone Star” Dietz, an American Indian. When the team moved to Washington in 1937 it was renamed the Washington Redskins. George Marshall clearly did not consider the name disparaging.

Notice that Poser begins his argument in favor of the name Redskins by acknowledging that the name is “disparaging” to most people today.  Really, that’s the end of the discussion right there, since “matter which may disparage” is not protected under trademark law.  As for whether the name was always disparaging, it doesn’t matter.  American history is filled with words that were acceptable 70 years ago that are not today.  Whether a racist like Marshall considered the name disparaging in 1933 is irrelevant.  At the least, it speaks to a man who saw everything through the prism of race.  Marshall could have named the team the Washington Lone Stars, after Coach Dietz’s nickname.  Instead, he chose to single out Dietz’s race.  What would the response be if the Rooneys “honored” head coach Mike Tomlin by changing the Steelers name to the Pittsburgh Coloreds?  (Another word that has evolved over time.)

But the worst thing about the Redskins name may be that it forces millions of fans to be complicit in the franchise’s history of racism.  It’s one thing to be a fan of a team with an ugly past– most Major League Baseball teams fall in that category.  It’s another thing to preserve and pass down that legacy to fans too young to remember commercialized racism and segregated sports leagues.  Every dollar that goes to the Redskins is a validation of George Marshall’s belief that basic respect of other human beings is secondary to entertainment.  It’s an embarrassing testament to the unwillingness of Redskins fans and ownership to face up to their franchise’s original sin.

There are already a number of newspapers around the nation who refuse to use the word Redskins, and most of them are in areas with significant Native American populations.  There’s no question the name is disparaging.  In 1962, it took an act of federal government to force George Marshall to integrate his team.  It’s amazing that 47 years later, long after his death, it may take a Supreme Court ruling to finally put his ugly legacy to rest.

UPDATE: Gather round, kids, it’s analogy time.  It’s not a perfect one, but it’ll do.  Here’s what anyone who defends the name Redskins basically amounts to.

Imagine we’re living in the Jim Crow South and segregated drinking fountains have just been outlawed.  And imagine there’s a large group of people who want to keep the “Whites only” and “Coloreds only” signs over the fountains, even though the signs no longer have any power.  People can drink from whatever fountain they want, they just want to keep the signs up because they’re a part of our history and it would be too much of a hassle to change them.  Of course, African-Americans feel angered and humiliated by the signs, and they fight for decades to get them taken down, but that’s only because they don’t realize the signs aren’t meant to be offensive.

That’s what Redskins fans and ownership amounts to.  They’re people who see no problem with keeping “Whites only” and “Coloreds only” signs over the fountains.

Related posts:

1. Glenn Beck: Obama is a “racist” with “deep-seated hatred” for whites
2. The NFL reigns supreme?
3. 2009 NFL season and Super Bowl predictions from a self-proclaimed expert

It’s foolish to think we can hold onto a majority by playing it safe and not getting anything done.  There is a whole lot of room to move between playing it safe and being crazy single-minded drones like Republicans.  No one is saying we should copy their MO, just a little of their conviction.

When we lose seats in 2010, as is highly likely, then we’ll all take to the blogs whining about how the Republicans are ramming stuff down our throats that we don’t like.  What the fuck are we doing now?

Ugh…you know, the truth is that though Democrats are supposed to be the liberal party, the party of opposition, they are not.  They truly are a hodgepodge of people who don’t like the modern Republican Party.  That doesn’t necessarily equal liberal or progressive.

So we have one party and a bunch of people who don’t like that party.  That’s it.

There are two things this brings to mind for me.  The first is the interview Bill Maher did with Bill Moyer a few weeks ago, where Moyer said that the reason Democrats can’t seem to accomplish things that have large public support (like meaningful health care reform) is because America is actually not a two-party democracy, it’s a one-party corporatocracy.  While we think we’re sending our representatives to Washington with our votes, our representatives think (correctly) that they’re actually being sent to Washington by the money they’ve raised from various corporations.  And because Democrats and Republicans get their money from the same corporations, they basically have the same non-progressive, status quo agenda once voted in, regardless of how they frame it in speeches.

Republicans are less hypocritical in this respect because conservatism by definition is keeping things as is, and Republicans are great at getting that done (hence their exclusion from the title of this post).  Democrats, on the other hand, have the extra hurdle of keeping things as is while making it look like they’re delivering on the change they promised.  Of course, there are always social issues that will genuinely get the support of one party over another; and for that reason alone our votes are still worth something.  But if the issue involves some large corporation’s bottom line– even for issues as grave as war– it’s almost always going to go whichever way Wall Street pushes it.

The other thing tigger500’s post brings to mind is a post by Matthew Yglesias a few weeks ago about how the prevailing moral value in Washington is cynical self-interest.  Yglesias writes:

For example, Senators who genuinely do believe that carbon dioxide emissions are contributing to a global climate crisis seem to think nothing of nevertheless taking actions that endanger the welfare of billions of people on the grounds that acting otherwise would be politically problematic in their state. In other words, they don’t want to do the right thing because their self-interest points them toward doing something bad. But it’s impossible to imagine these same Senators stabbing a homeless person in a dark DC alley to steal his shoes. And what’s more, the entire political class would be (rightly!) shocked and appalled by the specter of a Senator murdering someone for personal gain. Yet it’s actually taken for granted that “my selfish desires dictate that I do x” constitutes a legitimate reason to do the wrong thing on important legislation.

So basically you have a lot of politicians, Democrat and Republican, whose primary guiding value on every issue is whatever will help them get reelected.  Voting for health care reform may be a godsend to the millions of their constituents who are uninsured and underinsured and the millions more who are vulnerable to health-care-induced bankruptcy.  But if that means opening themselves up to attack in 2010 from a primary challenger who might run commercials labeling them a socialist or might put their picture up next to a potentially unpopular Obama, they won’t do it.

And if there’s any doubt that self-interest is the prevailing value in Washington, consider that 90% to 98% of House incumbents get reelected every term, which is among the highest incumbency rates in the world (over the last 20 years, the Senate has been between 75% and 96%).  There simply is nothing else that gets accomplished by Congress with that kind of bipartisan consistency.

With that said, Obama will get some version of health care reform passed this year, if for no other reason than because he’s gotten the insurance companies on board.  That’s the good news.  The bad news is that he’s gotten the insurance companies on board, which no doubt means that somewhere there’s been a tradeoff where the American people are getting screwed at the expense of higher profits.  If Matt Taibbi’s enlightening and devastating Rolling Stone article is any indication, our government is currently fixing our broken health care system by putting lipstick on the pig and then forcing everyone to buy into it (two things Obama vehemently opposed during the campaign).

The public option has already been watered down because Republicans argued against it, saying it would provide Americans with better coverage at lower cost and thus force insurance companies to improve their services or go out of business.  Let me say that again.  The argument against the public option is that it would provide Americans with better coverage at lower cost.  Is there any question who our politicians really work for?

The bottom line is that there are certain very serious crises– like health care and global warming– that involve deeply entrenched corporate interests, and our government in its current state cannot fix them.  The inmates will never regulate the asylum (as we saw illustrated by last year’s financial collapse), especially if it means getting back in their cells and handing the keys over to the warden.

The maddeningly simple solution to all this is two-fold: campaign finance reform and congressional term limits. Campaign finance reform, if done properly, will take the corporate money out of politics.  It will ensure that our health care legislation will not be written by politicians whose campaigns are dependent upon funding from Aetna, Blue Cross, and Kaiser Permanente.  It will ensure that our global warming legislation is not sponsored by the good people at Exxon Mobil.  And it will ensure that our leaders in Washington don’t dedicate half their time and resources to raising money.

Congressional term limits will put a big dent in the plague of Washington self-interest.  It will ensure that all 535 members of Congress aren’t at all times facing a future reelection bid.  It will ensure that there are no nine-term 91-year-old U.S. Senators who are faced with the choice of getting reelected and rejoining lifelong colleagues back in Washington to work for another six years or going back home to West Virginia to die.  And it will ensure that things like morality and the greater good have a bigger say in our government, and that every decision Congress makes isn’t solely dependent on the individual fortunes of those voting.

Will campaign finance reform and congressional term limits solve all our government’s problems?  No.  We’ll think of new ones.  But the fact is, our political system is broken; it works reliably and efficiently for those in it, but not for the people it’s meant to serve.  Simply put, corporate money and unlimited term limits are cancers that infect everything our government does.  Unless we cut them out completely, the concerns of ordinary Americans will continue to be a distant third on Washington’s list of priorities.

POSTSCRIPT: Right now, in a case that has received very little media attention (Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission), the Supreme Court is in the process of lifting the current restrictions on corporate spending in political elections.  Needless to say, this would pour gasoline on every single issue our country faces.  The corporate personhood argument being made by conservative justices is based on the belief that our founding fathers intended for corporations to have the same rights and privileges– including contributing to political campaigns– as individuals.  First, this entire argument is based not on any prior court decision or anything our founding fathers ever said, but on an off-the-record comment made by Chief Justice Morrison Waite in 1886.  Second, this is a case where legal theory pales in comparison to the stark reality of what a Biblical flood of special-interest money would do to our government.  Meanwhile, Justice Sonia Sotomayor– in one of her first significant actions on the Court– is challenging the entire foundation of corporate personhood law.  Unfortunately, she appears to be outnumbered.

Related posts:

1. On Politics and the Sorry State of Affairs (or, you know, the Democrats)
2. Confused by the Health Care Debate?
3. How Facebook taught me to fear and loathe Sarah Palin

The Senate confirmed Sonia Sotomayor today.  The vote count: 68-31.

Every single “no” vote was a Republican.  Interestingly:

• This included both senators from Texas (John Cornyn and Kay Bailey Hutchison), a state that, as of 2007, is 36 percent Latino.  I’m betting they felt comfortable in their racism as neither is up for re-election in 2010.
• This included both senators from Arizona (John McCain and John Kyl), a state that, as of 2007, is nearly 30 percent Latino.  Oh – and McCain is up for re-election in 2010.  Clearly – he learned nothing from his loss last year.
• This included both senators from Utah (Orrin Hatch and Bob Bennett), a state that, as of 2007, is nearly 12 percent Latino.   Oh – Bob Bennett is up for re-election in 2010.  Good luck.

Actually – let’s get down to it:

Every single Republican senator up for re-election in 2010, except Judd Gregg of New Hampshire, voted against confirming Sonia Sotomayor.

The ads from the Left are gonna come fast and furious, folks (if the Left is smart).

Related posts:

1. Money and self-interest: Why the Democrats can’t get anything done
2. Best rap video of the year: Raekwon’s “House of Flying Daggers”
3. How Facebook taught me to fear and loathe Sarah Palin