Good. We don't need professional sports teams named after racial slurs.
The Navajos along with the vast majority of Native Americans don't think it's a slur, why should a bunch of white liberals think it is?
Source? Since when have the Navajos been the representatives of all Native Americans?
Red Mesa High school is located on the Navajo Indian Reservation.
Guess what the mascot and logo is? Yep, you guessed it.
REDSKINS
Nearly all the student at the school are Native American.
Has anyone told them that they're being racists using that "slur"?
Red Mesa High School (Teec Nos Pos, AZ) Basketball Home - MaxPreps.com
RMUSD #27 / Red Mesa High School
Ever heard of re-appropriation?
Is it really a racial slur? In my life I have never and none of my friends have referred Native Americans as redskins.....how about you?
I lived right next to the Nez Perce reservation and went to school with them....still never did.
Native American's make up less than 1% of the US demographics, it should be obvious of why you do not hear the slur used in common place. Fact is, it was used historically as a slur and referring to someone based solely on their complexion is dehumanizing.
Re-appropriation? Are you assuming that is what it is, or do you have actual facts that, that is the reason????
Yet left completely out of consideration is that many Native Americans themselves have no problems with sports teams nicknaming themselves the Redskins.
In 2004 the Annenberg Public Policy Center found that 90 percent of American Indians are not offended by the Washington Redskins retaining their nickname. What's more, and this is key (emphasis mine):
Claiming “scalps” automatically means “red skins” is revisionist history, to be blunt.
It was the Native Americans who first used the term “red” in order to differentiate between indigenous, white, and black people. When not referring to their individual and other tribes collectively, why would they use Indian, Native, or other adjectives to describe their obvious skin differences back then? Ives Goddard is a senior linguist at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of History. Goddard wrote the book, I am a Redskin: The Adoption of a Native American Expression (1769-1826) and notes the earliest uses of “red skin” were in recorded statements from Natives by the French who generally traded amicably with them. The French were careful to denote the “red” distinction was made by Natives themselves. By the time of the Phips Proclamation, according to Goddard, “red” to describe Natives was used “by both French and English…. Although Europeans sometimes used such expressions among themselves, however, they remained aware of the fact that this was originally and particularly a Native American usage.” Also citing Goddard in the recent article, “Before The Redskins Were The Redskins: The Use Of Native American Team Names In The Formative Era of American Sports, 1857-1944,” Professor of Law and historian J. Gordon Hylton writes about the term, “…throughout the nineteenth century, the term was essentially neutral when used by whites, reflecting neither a particularly positive or particularly negative connotation.”
Even Sitting Bull once remarked, “I am a red man. If the Great Spirit had desired me to be a white man he would have made me so in the first place.”
Despite Liberal Media Push, Poll Shows Vast Majority of Americans Aren't Offended by 'Redskins' | NewsBusters