Skin in the game
The Washington Redskins should refuse to change its mascot — and do something to really improve the lives of Native Americans
“It’s kind of a funny thing, though. A redskin playing for the Redskins.”
That was Carolina Panthers cornerback Josh Norman talking to ESPN about the $75 million deal he just signed to join the Washington Redskins this fall. Norman, whose parents are both part Native American, doesn’t seem too concerned about the mascot of his new team.
“Redskins is not offensive to me,” he told ESPN’s Kevin Van Valkenburg.
A year ago, Mike Wise, senior writer at ESPN, declared that a name change for the Redskins was inevitable. First it was journalists like those at Slate who refused to even publish the name. Then there were petitions to Twitter, Google and Facebook to remove the accounts belonging to the Redskins. There were protests in front of the stadium. California enacted legislation barring schools from using the Redskins name for their mascots. Madison, Wis., banned children from wearing any kind of clothing with a Nativethemed mascot. And, of course, the Obama administration decided to strip the team of its trademark protections.
As Wise wrote: “This is no longer merely a civil rights/social justice issue affecting our most marginalized ethnicity. Many people now have made the obvious leap that this issue impacts people of color.”
Well, maybe. The Washington Post conducted a poll that found more than 9 in 10 Native Americans weren’t offended by the name at all.
Indeed, the impacts on people of color are a little hard to quantify. The claim — trotted out by organizations like the National Conference of American Indians — that team names lead to lower self-esteem for Native Americans rests on a single 10-page conference paper by an assistant professor of psychology. And that paper seems to rest on an experiment performed on a group of 172 American Indian students at one university in the Midwest.
Perhaps Josh Norman will finally put an end to this ridiculous conversation we are having about American Indian mascots. But maybe he and team owner Dan Snyder could do more to focus on the real prob- lems being faced by this community. The most impoverished racial group in country, American Indians (particularly those on reservations) face sky-high unemployment and gangactivity rates higher than those among blacks or Hispanics. From alcohol-use disorders to sexual assault to child abuse, American Indians are statistically worse off than just about any ethnic group in the country.
In 2014, Snyder launched the Original Americans Foundation to alleviate his public-relations crisis. The mission was “to provide meaningful and measurable resources that provide genuine opportunities for tribal communities.”
Snyder has tried to fund skate parks and give coats and computers to poor kids on reservations.
In this sense, Snyder’s efforts will be about as effective as those by the federal government, which gives American Indians money but not the freedom they need to improve their situations.
American Indians live in poverty because they have no property rights. Their land is held in trust by the federal government. They can’t buy or sell it or develop it without the permission of bureaucrats in Washington. They can’t get a mortgage or a loan to start a business. They are being overregulated to death. And their dependence on the federal government for billions of dollars each year is only making things worse. Saying this to Redskins fans may not win Snyder points with Washington elites, but he lost them a long time ago.
If Snyder really wanted to make a difference in the lives of Indians and stick it to his critics, he could also focus on the deplorable state of Indian education. Only 50 percent of American Indians graduate from high school. The Bureau of Indian Education spends over $20,000 per pupil and can’t even keep its buildings from falling down. As John Kline, a Republican congressman from Minnesota, explained at a hearing in May 2015, “You’ve got collapsing roofs, leaking roofs, buckling floors, exposed wires, popping circuit breakers, gas leaks.”
Snyder might consider giving a large donation to a school like Red Cloud on the Pine Ridge reservation or St. Labre, which serves the Northern Cheyenne and Crow tribes in Montana. These Catholic schools actually graduate the vast majority of students and send most on to college as well. They charge next to nothing for tuition and are entirely dependent on outside donations.
Or Snyder might consider giving some of his largesse to Teach for America, which sends elite college graduates to work in some of the poorest Indian communities in the country. Or he might fund more charter schools near reservations to provide these kids with an alternative to the deplorable education they are getting now. For those states like South Dakota and Montana that have large Indian populations but no charter laws, Snyder might consider a serious lobbying effort to change that.
Critics of the Redskins name are mostly folks who know nothing about American Indians but think their problems can be solved by more money and greater cultural sensitivity. Neither is true and Dan Snyder can prove it.