Under pressure

What the Redskins have taught us,

It’s the right decision, it really is. However we got here, we should all be glad that the Nepean Redskins, a local minor football organization, are dropping their offensive nickname. No one should assume that the people involved with the organization had any intent to spread hatred, but the opposition to the name change was always a tacit endorsement of racism.

Perhaps they have come to their senses; perhaps they (finally) felt shame; perhaps they just didn’t want to fight the complaint that was lodged with the Ontario Human Rights Commission. Whatever the reason, the right decision was made.

Supporters of the moniker will disassociate themselves from the racist elements of the name, pointing to history and the continued existence of the NFL’s Washington Redskins as justification for this quiet suburban intolerance. But it’s a façade. They are either lying to themselves or just plain lying. Naming your child’s sports team after the skin tone of an historically (and currently) marginalized ethnic group is simple, basic racism. Intentions don’t matter; a racial slur is a racial slur, regardless. And as Ian Campeau, the local man who launched the complaint, notes, we wouldn’t accept a team named the Blackskins or the Yellowskins.

This isn’t a debate confined to Ottawa minor football. The movement to re-name the Washington Redskins is gaining ground. Call it progress or progressivism, but more Americans are objecting to the name. Certain media organizations, like Slate, are no longer referring to Washington’s NFL team as the Redskins. Soon this movement will hit critical mass and team owner Daniel Snyder will do the right thing, just like Nepean.

Ian Campeau deserves credit for forcing the local team’s hand. He has been urging the club to drop the nickname for two years, with no success. Without his official complaint, the Redskins would have remained the Redskins.

His cause was just, but his method was imperfect. Campeau, in essence, was threatening to bring the weight of the government down on this minor football club. A seemingly heavy action for a team that could not cause significant material harm to anyone. They were not the vanguard of Canadian intolerance.

But to suggest that the use of the name would harm absolutely no one is naïve. Canada has a wretched history regarding the treatment of the Native population. An Ojibwa, Ian Campeau has, no doubt, experienced both subtle and overt racism throughout his life. It is his wish to minimize such experiences for his daughter, and thus his crusade.

It may have been unsavoury, and it certainly wasn’t his initial course of action, but only the official complaint elicited a response from the Redskins.

The team always had an out, of course. This issue is not new, and they always had the option to change the name. The Washington Redskins have faced multiple lawsuits. Any football fan so devoted to the NFL must have been aware of the controversy.

So they could have changed this years ago. Instead, they chose to cling to the slur, decency be damned.

The Human Rights complaint changed that. It focused the public’s attention on the issue, and, at last, Campeau’s cause had some traction. The complaint and associated coverage brought him some public relations capital, just what was needed to raise the public’s ire.

And this is the potential value of laws, regulations and commissions that attempt to force morality on people. These tools can be used to release the common decency within people. In intolerant societies, these decrees will restrict hate-filled actions, giving room for tolerance and acceptance to sprout and bloom.

Canada, thankfully, is not such an extreme case. We are, generally, a fairly tolerant society, so tolerant that we have created human rights commissions. Ironically, it is the very tolerance that inspired these commissions that made an actual hearing unnecessary in this case. Once this story reached sufficient saturation in the press and social media, the outcome was sealed.

And it wasn’t just a local story. The issue has been discussed across the continent. The Redskins could not escape the spotlight unless they changed their name.

So this story comes to an end with a whimper. There is no drawn-out legal battle. Club representatives are not seen making impassioned pleas on the steps of City Hall. We can be thankful that this did not get ugly, and that the decency of both our city and our nation swayed the club.

Because, in the end, it is far better for social change to come from within, for regular folks to exert pressure on those people and organizations that are behaving poorly. This change, which reflects the greater tolerance of the population, has a better chance to stick than any change decreed by a human rights commission.