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July 7, 2020 - RadixJournal - Richard Spencer
53:21
America's Team

Mark Brahmin and Richard Spencer discuss football and the inevitable transformation of America's Game, from Colin Kaepernick's triumph martyrdom to the inevitable renaming of the Washington Redskins. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit radixjournal.substack.com/subscribe

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Mark, how are you?
I'm doing well.
How about yourself?
Great.
Let's talk football.
Hopefully this won't get banned from any place.
We're just talking sports.
You know?
Isn't that what YouTube wants?
We'll do an unboxing.
Yeah, I wouldn't hold your breath with you.
Well, among the...
Radix crew, we're kind of the jock element, I guess, so to speak, in the sense that we like to watch football and maybe even play it a little bit.
Did you ever play football?
Yeah, I did.
I was more of a hockey player, though.
That was more my sport.
New England, you know.
Exactly.
Yeah, I played football in Texas, so that was a rite of passage.
If you didn't play football, you were a cock.
And I'm glad I did, even though I wasn't that great.
Yeah, no, I was glad to have the experience as well.
I mean, it's an interesting sport.
I don't think I fully...
I probably appreciated it more after I was out of school, just because I had more of a...
You know, I wasn't really a sports fan in high school, even though I played sports.
So I don't think I had a kind of appreciation for football.
Or as much of an appreciation for football as a football sports fan would have been starting football in high school.
We talked about this on our other podcast.
One of the things that was less exciting about the sport to me is that you are a cog in the machine.
Primary.
It's a little less fun.
Well, you have to kind of give up your ego to play football.
I mean, when I was on freshman and JV team, or I guess we just had a freshman team.
We didn't have a JV because my school is too small.
But when I was on freshman football, I actually played tight end and fullback.
So, I mean, I would catch the occasional pass and run the ball and whatever.
Once I entered varsity, they were like, all right, you're playing on the offensive line.
But you kind of have to give up your ego and block for people who are faster than you are, or they're going to sit you on the bench.
It's how it goes.
And it's pretty obvious when you're not going with the flow and getting with the program.
And if you're not, they will bench you faster than...
You know, you can say, throw me the ball, coach.
Like, they're just going to put you on the bench.
And I don't know.
I mean, I think that's actually kind of part of it.
And that's part of the reason why the sport kind of does have value.
I remember my father went to Lawrenceville, which was an all-boys boarding school up in New Jersey.
It was actually kind of...
A bit of a Princeton feeder, but, you know, people would go to other schools as well.
But, yeah, I mean, part of the ethos of the school was for everyone to play house football.
And, you know, and basically everyone played.
So it didn't matter how little you were, how unathletic you were, how nerdy you were.
You still got out there and played.
And, you know, obviously it was, you know, competitive without being super competitive.
It was basically about...
The process of becoming a team and the ones who are the most athletic carrying the ball and the other guys blocking for them and kind of all working.
So, yeah, I mean, I think in that sense, there's a lot to admire about the sport.
Very different than baseball, which is about individual matchups.
But anyway, football has become...
The national pastime much more than baseball.
I mean, baseball is still around.
It still has lots of fans.
I like baseball, but football is really on another level in terms of just coverage in the media.
I mean, the World Series is barely covered at this point.
Whereas with football, any minor injury or controversy or...
Drunken violence arrest is covered hotly by the media.
It's just much bigger.
And I don't know, maybe we've seen peak football, but I don't think it's going to change dramatically, at least in the next couple of years, although we're going to talk about that.
But it has become the national pastime or the national game.
But that also means that it...
Has to go with the flow of the national mood.
And in this sense, I think it's worthwhile to look at football as kind of a microcosm of what is going on in terms of America and everything.
I mean, first off, just in terms of...
I don't know if there will be one.
I don't know what exactly is going to happen, but it's certainly in dispute.
But beyond that, what we've seen from the George Floyd protest is this move towards iconoclasm as the ultimate meaning of So, you know, at the beginning, it was about, oh, we need to arrest these bad officers.
And then it quickly went into, we need to rethink the police entirely, if not defund them, or should we end policing and bring back or bring...
forward, community, whatever.
And that was actually a real issue.
There were protests around the nation, around the world.
But it seems like The death of George Floyd has kind of settled down into iconoclasm.
We saw this similar thing happen with the mass murder committed by Dylann Roof back in 2015.
And at the very beginning of that controversy, it was all about gun control and maybe a little bit of...
We need to remove Confederate flag paraphernalia and so on.
And so it's almost like America seems to settle in to we're going to engage in symbolic change or symbolic destruction.
And I mean symbolic quite literally.
We're going to change all our symbols, but we don't actually have to change the infrastructure.
So, and we seem to be settling into that with George Floyd as well, where we're not going to actually end the police.
That's a bit much.
I do think that the era of tough policing and mass imprisonment, I do think that that will change and kind of come to an end.
But I think it's a bit much to ask the government to end policing in total.
But what we're going to do instead is have rioters tear down monuments, and then also have legislators just kind of do it legally.
So this past weekend, the Mississippi State Legislature, you know, which is pretty, And football, as the new national pastime, just goes along with this.
And you can think of a lot of these things as kind of like, oh, well, this is a side issue.
It's sports.
It doesn't really matter or whatever.
But it actually does matter.
And it definitely matters to normies who care about football much more than they care about politics and know more about it than they know about politics or culture or geopolitical affairs, to say the least.
And it actually also kind of acts as a microcosm for what's happening.
So basically, there are two major things that have occurred.
The first is that the Washington Redskins are, I would say, at this point, almost certain to change their name.
Um, I can even remember rumblings about this controversy back in the 1980s.
And then in the 2000s, I think it's the latest 2009, there was actually a court case and there was an appeal that was not heard by the Supreme Court.
So it got that far.
There was another kind of blow-up around...
Maybe, when was it?
2013 or something like that.
And then now, this, you know, a month after George Floyd's death has come to the fore, as we must end this now.
There's also an issue with the national anthem.
And we can maybe talk about that first and then delve into the Redskins.
But Colin Kaepernick was, in 2004, And 17, I guess, was kneeling before the national anthem.
And this became a crisis.
It became a hot-button political issue with Donald Trump saying, you know, if I were the owner of those football teams, I'd say, get that son of a bitch off the field.
And people started, you know, boycotting the NFL, not watching the games.
Then, Colin Kaepernick, even though his career as a football player ended, effectively, he became a hero of sorts and a kind of left-wing activist and cause celeb for all sorts of things.
I think there's a new series on Netflix dedicated to his high school years or some nonsense like that.
I think this is a microcosm as well where the right kind of wins a short-term victory and then long-term defeat, where Colin Kaepernick was basically expressing the ideology of Black Lives Matter.
I mean, not exactly, but more or less.
And Donald Trump succeeded by making it kind of about patriotism and symbolizing.
He's disrespecting the flag.
He's disrespecting our republic.
And then they kind of, the Conservatives always kind of lose in the end.
They gain these, you know, immediate victories that are basically kind of emotional and reactive.
And then they ultimately get cocked at the end of the day.
And I think you can see that here now.
So, you know, Colin Kaepernick was persona non grata in the league.
He was not signed by any team, even though...
He was actually pretty good.
His career was declining, but he was better than a lot of other people playing quarterback in the NFL.
But then he became a hero, and now he's kind of ultimately won, regardless of whether he goes back into the NFL, which I think is almost...
I imagine some team will sign him, but he's ultimately won in the sense that the NFL is now...
Doing something, apparently, this was leaked to ESPN, I believe, but I could go check on this, but apparently on week one of the NFL, they're going to sing Lift Every Voice, which is, I did not know this, is the Black National Anthem of sorts.
It's a fairly non-offensive song, kind of Negro spiritual type thing.
I think it was written by this kind of Booker T. Washington.
Black Educator or something.
But that will be sung at the beginning of every game on week one.
They aren't quite kneeling in the national anthem, but they're almost getting what they want.
I have no doubt that BLM or BLM's core message will be prominent at these football games.
And so it's kind of like...
One more example where the right spasmodically reacts to something, but then also kind of misunderstands it.
And so they turned Colin Kaepernick's protest, which was about police violence and black identity and so on, and they kind of said, well, we're not going to address that issue really, but you're disrespecting the flag.
That's unpatriotic.
You should never be able to burn a flag, blah, blah, blah.
And they kind of misunderstood it or kind of brought it into their frame of reference, and they won a short-term victory but then lost the war.
And I think they will definitely lose this upcoming war.
The NFL has been, over the last 10 years or so, it's been more than that, probably 20 years.
It's been dominated by a military aesthetic and ethos with, you know, huge flags that cover the entire field and F-14s flying over during the national anthem and soldiers everywhere and veterans.
And I think in one month they dress up in camo and stuff like that.
They also dress up in pink for breast cancer, which maybe that's worthy of a podcast in itself.
But they definitely have, you know, embraced a kind of hyper patriotism.
But I think they're going to go in that whole hog.
And it's yet another example of These conservatives, again, just kind of winning a little short-term victory, getting people to hate on the NFL a little bit, and the NFL kind of standing up against something that's controversial by, you know, effectively kicking Colin Kaepernick out of the league, not signing him.
But then just kind of ultimately losing and doing something that almost Colin Kaepernick couldn't even imagine, you know, in 2017 when he was kneeling, you know.
You know, lift every voice, stuff like that.
So what are your thoughts on this, Mark?
Well, yeah, I mean, there's a lot there.
It is interesting, though, that there is this sort of initial phase of resistance from the conservatives where it seems like they achieve some victory early on, but then they end up losing.
And I think that it does in a way, it does create a kind of theater where Right.
reform, but then they eventually succeed.
So it creates a kind of narrative.
You could say a kind of moralizing narrative for BLM at BLM because they can look back at this supposed period of struggling.
And Kaepernick is a kind of martyr.
I mean, his career, I mean, look, his career was declining.
But, you know, I don't know how old he is now, maybe in his early 30s.
I mean, he was a, that was the prime era to be an NFL quarterback for him.
And that was taken away from him.
I mean, he has not played in, is it going on four seasons?
So he was kind of, he became a martyr of sorts.
You know, a very well-funded martyr, but a martyr.
Yeah, no, so I mean, but so I guess the question then becomes, because what happened in 2017, 2016, whenever exactly it was, I guess it was 2017, where Trump was countersignaling basically the NFL, and he was.
I mean, his, and this shows us kind of the power of political leadership.
And how sort of sheep-like people are, effectively, where Trump was basically saying, ah, you know, the NFL thing's not patriotic.
They're not sufficiently honoring the national anthem.
And the NFL was actually seeing a decline in ticket sales and viewership as a consequence of this, you know, basically something that Trump...
I mean, it was out there in the culture, but Trump was kind of leading the charge, as it were, and had Trump not taken that stance, the NFL may have suffered, but probably only marginally, and maybe not really at all.
So it shows really kind of the influence that Trump had during that period as it concerns the NFL.
But his leadership now is kind of like he is in a way a sort of discredited leader.
I mean, he just doesn't have the same sort of clout that he once had because he just doesn't have the same popularity.
And for a number of reasons that should be obvious to people now.
But I don't know, what is the fate of the NFL, though, if it changes, it kind of rebrands in this way, where it becomes effectively a BLM league?
Because we have to assume that people are going to be kneeling throughout the season now.
I mean, if what's happened in the larger society will be reflected, and it will be reflected in the league, then all the players that were formally standing up and that wouldn't take a knee, you know, all the Tom Brady's or whoever else, these kind of white players that were kind of like...
You know, it's alright if a teammate does it, but, you know, I'm patriotic.
This is the best country on earth.
You know, sort of the standard view that a kind of white football player would have, and even some black football players.
Like, not everyone was taking a knee.
And it kind of varied from team to team, depending on sort of the culture of that team, as it were.
But everyone's going to be kneeling now.
Oh, yeah.
J.J. Watt.
Yeah.
J.J. Watt is kind of the...
He's a bit of the face of the NFL, even though he plays defensive line, and he is very good.
But he's kind of like the golden boy of the NFL, despite the fact that he's a lineman.
And he's blonde, super strong, very good, no scandals, nice guy.
And I actually saw something where he was tweeting out, like...
Someone was saying, I don't think JJ will take a knee, and he's like, don't speak for me.
This is about bigger issues and stuff like that.
I think it would be actually quite symbolic if the white players like JJ Watt and Tom Brady took a knee.
I think that would be huge.
But it would be done in a kind of...
Hegelian synthesis, so to speak.
Yeah, and this is a theater.
This is a theater, right?
It's like, just briefly, this is like that tearful moment in the movie where the grouch, the racist grouch, finally breaks and says, you know, you were right all along and starts weeping or whatever.
Anyway, continue what you were saying.
for instance the Dallas Cowboys are the most popular football team in America and I think they might even be the most popular or even or at the very least valuable franchise around the world they're up there and
And he's never spoken out in favor of BLM.
He's gotten some heat for that.
But what he did in 2017 was this kind of synthesis where, you know, I think at one point he's wearing like pig socks or something like that.
And then it becomes this like black activist or, you know, in Kaepernick's case, you know, angry mulatto, you know, bashing America kind of thing.
But when Jerry Jones did it, he had the entire team come out, including his half black quarterback and their white coach.
And they all kind of came out and they were arm in arm and they kneeled.
Almost in this way of flipping it around and making it patriotic.
It is theater, but it's also symbolism where you don't quite know what it means.
You could read that as, ah, the whites have knelt before the power of BLM.
They've lost or so on.
Or you could flip it around and say, some bad things happened in our country's history.
But our founding ideals have led us to this day where all men are truly created equal.
And to be pro-equal rights is to be an American.
And also the kind of religious overtones of kneeling together arm in arm.
I mean, it's inherently this Christian act.
And I think Jerry, kind of in his brilliant way, I mean, he is clearly a genius.
Of sorts, a bit of a genius like Trump, I guess, was able to kind of flip it.
And he recognized that he was losing and that if he went out and just confronted Kaepernick directly, he would lose.
And so he kind of flipped it on its head and made it this...
Weirdly patriotic thing to do.
And I think the NFL will do that as well.
And they'll make it kind of like, you know, to truly be a proud white man, you have to kneel or something.
It's kind of, you know what I mean?
It's weird.
But that's how it, you know, that's how it becomes like not just a single man protesting and becomes this national phenomenon.
Yeah, well, as in Christianity, it's a kind of humbling yourself before a higher ideal, as it were.
A humble brag, kind of.
Yeah, yeah, I mean, so, but I mean, ultimately, it is a kind of deep form of humiliation, to be honest, right?
I mean, on a deep sort of psychological level, it is a form of racial degradation and humiliation.
In Christianity, Christianity also contains this as well, in the sense that, I mean, to the extent that you're not a Jew yourself, you're kneeling before Jewish Savior.
Here, you're kneeling pretty explicitly before blacks, in the interests of blacks.
Like, you're kneeling before the interests of blacks.
I mean, there's no other way to sort of interpret kneeling in the name of Black Lives Matter, right?
Right.
So, yeah, it's very striking in that regard.
I mean, I guess a couple of things I would say is that, in a way, I mean, these problems are just kind of baked into multiculturalism in the sense that there has to, like, every society naturally kind of conforms to one direction or toward one ideal or toward one direction.
And we see that sort of forming in America in the sense that, you know...
Our greatest concern are really the lives of blacks.
You know, black lives matter.
And, you know, you have this sort of this rhetorical battle going on where, you know, these civ-nats or these amnats are saying, well, all lives matter, right?
And that, you know, it's offensive to consider that.
Only Black Lives Matter.
But in the retort, of course, is that, well, we're not saying only Black Lives Matter, but we're saying it's time to support blacks because they've been oppressed or persecuted in America, you know, especially through this police brutality.
But, of course, that's not, I mean, psychologically, these amnats are responding to something that's quite real.
What is going on is that the Black Lives Matter is taking Even all lives matter is a total cock.
And I'm not saying that in the sense that we should start chanting white lives matter.
I guess you could call this Caducean if you want, but it's this sense of like, it's like the left is saying, well, you know, there's still racism.
The legacy of slavery lives on through systemic racism and brutality, etc.
And then the white response is, no, all lives matter.
We're all one, you know, in this kind of thing.
It's like both are wrong.
And I'm not sure saying white lives matter is much better.
You know, that declaring that something matters like that is almost inherently a kind of inferiority position of saying, you know, if you have to say it...
That means that it's in question, you know, so to speak.
And so I just I don't know the degree to which saying white lives matter is moralizing.
I mean, my response is to say no lives matter, which is that...
I just want to get out of the frame of humanism and basically say that you only matter if you're part of something that is bigger and bolder and greater than yourself.
You only matter as an individual in the sense that you're part of an achievement of flourishing and greatness.
Yeah, but I'm not sure No Lives Matter will really catch on on Twitter.
But again, I guess my major point is even the right response is just a total cuck out.
It's just basically saying, oh yeah, we're all the same here.
We all fled oppression and tyranny to end up in this land where we could achieve individualism or something.
It's inherently demoralizing even in itself.
Yeah, white lives matter.
The ADL actually declares that like a hate slogan or like a slogan of white supremacy, right?
I mean, it's absurd.
It's okay to be white as well.
That's where we are.
It's like we're saying, it's okay, guys.
It's okay.
Yeah, but what's implied there is that white lives don't matter if you believe that white lives matter.
So we live in very interesting times, as they say.
But also, it feels like it's just peak cuckery.
And on some level, too, I think that from our perspective, obviously, I think demoralization among whites is at an all-time high.
Personally, I'm not feeling it, because I think that there's kind of two sides to it.
And the other side is that this kind of system of multiculturalism is kind of grinding to its logical conclusion, right?
In the sense that it's becoming...
It's becoming more and more offensive to rational and sound-minded people, and it's becoming more draconian in the way that it sort of enforces its will.
So it has to deplatform dissenting voices.
It has to become more draconian in terms of censorship.
But it's also, it's just becoming, to anyone that is still kind of awake, I mean, because as we've discussed before, there's two sides of this demoralization.
One is that they are legitimately demoralized.
I mean, it's clearly hypocritical, and it's clearly...
Very aggressively anti-white.
So two things are happening simultaneously.
And probably what they're doing is they're kind of distilling a resistance that's just like, you know, this is just completely out of control.
And now people who are resisting this system are armed with all this evidence of just like this thing is clearly a sort of anti-white system.
And multiculturalism does not.
It has no benefits for me.
It is only against my interests.
It's only sort of contrary to my interests.
So it's a kind of double-edged sword.
But, yeah, it's fascinating.
I mean, I wrote an article that I was pretty proud of.
It's actually in the first—it's a chapter in that first book, and it's the right not to be offended in your own land.
And so this is just a kind of inherent problem to multiculturalism in the sense, as I mentioned before, is that the society has one direction.
It's going in one direction or the other.
And ours is kind of going in this BLM direction, this multiculturalism, anti-white direction.
And it's becoming increasingly a hostile and offensive culture for us.
But in the process, it's becoming ostensibly a more—a less offensive and more livable and in a more benevolent culture from the perspective of blacks.
Now, I mean, I think it's a more—there's a more kind of complex equation there.
But you understand what I'm saying.
So for this society to become unoffensive and pleasing or appeasing to blacks, it has to become offensive to us.
Right.
In order for them not to perceive themselves as persecuted, it's required that we become, you know, more persecuted, more censored.
You know, people who can be offended with impunity and don't really have a say in it.
And also suffering real kind of economic consequences and not even just if we're kind of speaking up, speaking up and being rebellious and therefore losing our jobs.
But, you know, through this sort of impunity.
I mean, again, on YouTube, I mean, it's like...
This podcast cannot be possible.
No one should listen to this.
And the thought that someone might be offended by it, that needs to be taken so seriously that we just need to simply ban it from the platform altogether.
And that goes for a whole host of other people.
I saw E. Michael Jones was just banned today.
Even though he doesn't agree with the two of us on much, but we're kind of equally offensive, and we don't have a right to speak in our own land.
Yeah, so this is the other aspect of this, is that the Washington Redskins franchise is being...
I don't know exactly what was going on behind the scenes for a while.
Again, I can remember this controversy surfacing as early as the 1980s.
It might have even surfaced before then.
So it's been around, but it's obviously been very...
Marginal for a long time.
And, you know, just the fact that the Redskins play in Washington, I'm sure there are a ton of, you know, liberal fans of the Skins, particularly when they were so successful in the 1980s.
But now it's really coming to a head.
And so there was a potential Supreme Court case that was never heard.
There was major media efforts to get them to change.
And the owner, Dan Snyder, Who is this tech billionaire, I think, who is obviously a terrible owner, because the Redskins have sucked for a long time now.
But he is a fan himself, and he just refuses to back down on this.
Up until...
This weekend.
A lot happened this weekend.
This came on July 3rd.
Certainly symbolic.
This is all coming around the 4th of July and Trump's Mount Rushmore speech and all this kind of stuff.
In light of recent events around our country and feedback from our community, the Washington Redskins are announcing the team will undergo a thorough review of the team's name.
This review formalizes the initial discussions the team has been having with the lead.
That's an interesting sentence right there.
So clearly he's getting pushback from Roger Goodell.
Dan Snyder, owner of the Redskins, stated, This process allows the team to take into account not only the proud tradition and history of the franchise, but also input from our alumni, the organization, sponsors, the National Football League, and local community it is proud to represent on and off the field.
Ron Rivera, head coach of the Washington Redskins, remarked, this issue is of personal importance to me, and I look forward to working closely with Dan Snyder to make sure we continue the mission of honoring and supporting Native Americans in our military.
I believe that Ron Rivera is Hispanic, not Native American, although I might be wrong about that.
We believe this review can and will be conducted with the best interest of all in mind.
So you had this, you know, Dan Snyder being just...
Absolutely forthright and apparently intractable for a long time, saying we will never change the name.
And he was kind of viewed, I think, wrongly as almost like a nationalist owner, right-wing owner.
But if you actually look at...
What the Redskins have done, and even in terms of drafting players, they've clearly tried to keep everything in-house, and they've also been very eager to certainly draft black players.
I mean, all the teams are, to a certain extent, but draft black quarterbacks.
For instance, Doug Williams is a Major figure in the Redskins organization.
And to be honest, he's probably a major figure in the fact that they have been mediocre at best and absolutely...
Crappy at worst for a long time in terms of evaluating talent and so on.
So, you know, within Dan Snyder's intractable nature about the name, you know, which he loved when he was a kid watching, you know, all those great teams from the 80s, Joe Theismann, Doug Williams himself and others win Super Bowls, John Riggins, maybe the last great white running back for what that's worth.
And he was intractable in there, but in terms of what he was doing in his organization, he was actually, I don't know, you could arguably maybe the most pro-black owner in terms of promoting black Redskins within his organization.
And there was also some people were saying that the The other teams are going to change their names.
So Donald Trump actually tweeted out this morning.
They named teams out of strength, not weakness.
But now the Washington Redskins and Cleveland Indians, two fabled sports franchises, look like they're going to be changing their names in order to be politically correct.
Indians, like Elizabeth Warren, must be very angry right now.
I mean...
I don't quite know how Indians, Native Americans...
Your imitation has improved.
That was pretty good.
I was muted so you couldn't hear my chuckle.
Believe me, I've been practicing.
It's a complicated issue because Trump is right to a large extent, actually.
There's a reason why there are no teams named after the N-word, for instance, or the Blackskins, or the Africans, or And the reason is that even though Native Americans have had a really terrible time, they've always been respected and romanticized.
And blacks have been romanticized as well, but they haven't been romanticized in the same way.
Indians were romanticized as fierce warriors and were pushed off their land and killed to a very large degree and eventually put on reservations that are kind of outside of society.
I mean, they have smaller numbers, but they aren't really thought of as like a voting bloc.
I don't know if I've ever heard someone say Native American lives matter.
I mean, they are not the political football that Africans are.
They aren't viewed as this pathetic victim that we must always be kowtowing towards endlessly.
I mean, in a way, to their detriment, they've remained independent and semi-sovereign in their reservations.
But Trump is correct in the sense that You name a sports franchise after something you like, or just something characteristic about it, like the Red Sox or whatever.
But you want to name a team the Athletics, the Indians, the Cowboys, the Rangers.
You want to name something about something that's good or manly or badass in some way.
And that is the way that...
Americans of earlier generations viewed Indians and not the way that they viewed African Americans.
You're not going to have a team named the Slaves or anything like that.
So he is right.
And I don't think, despite the fact that Redskins is kind of more obviously racist in the sense of it's not the Chiefs or the Seminoles or the Fighting Illini or something like that.
It is the Redskins.
It just feels more...
But there's, you know, the idea that they would name a team after a racial slur, i.e.
something you despise, is ridiculous.
Of course, it was in some way a means of honoring Native Americans, and it's now gone out of fashion.
But, you know, I think it's, you know, I don't think any Native American will benefit from this, but it is just a way of engaging in iconoclasm and kind of...
Messing with the heads of white people who like that team.
It's a way of just taking away their toys, taking something that they beloved, and changing it.
And they'll probably reach a compromise.
They'll probably name it after, say, a tribe or something like that, which is kind of objectively less offensive and more honoring, calling them the Seminoles, the Cherokee, or whatever.
But at the same time, just that degree of taking away an icon is the MO, and it is the motivation behind everything that's happening.
So, I don't know, I'll let you respond, then I'll go a little bit into the history of the Redskins, because they're an interesting team.
Yeah, no, I think you raised a...
A good point, and I think it's correct that these were names that were designed to honor Indians, right?
And yeah, Redskins, it's probably the most sort of offensive of the names because it does refer to a racial characteristic or racial trait of Indians.
The hue of their skin, as it were.
But I, you know, I...
But I don't know, I think there are instances actually where blacks have been honored too in a kind of like manner.
If maybe not in sports name, maybe not in the names of sports teams, but those lawn jockeys, for example, the black lawn jockeys that are now considered like super racist, those were actually designed as a kind of homage or veneration of black jockeys because at one point...
Horse racing, it was exclusively black jockeys that were racing the horses.
So having a black lawn jockey on your yard was not intended as a way of humiliating blacks.
It was a kind of affectionate...
I mean, you might say it's patronizing, but it was a kind of affectionate homage to the black jockeys that people were watching, also like risking their lives, especially in that day and who people were fans of that were, you know, they were betting on the horses as they do today.
And so there were fans.
So it was not designed to denigrate blacks.
Now, I can see why people would see it as kind of patronizing or condescending and certainly reflected the racial hierarchy of the time.
But it was the.
The intention very much with the names like the Redskins or the Indians or the Chiefs was very similar in the sense that they were honoring them.
And there were actually, I think up until the 1980s, there was a, I don't know if it was a high school basketball team, but in Illinois, in Pekin, Illinois, which I think etymologically is derived from Peking, the mascot was, or the team name was the C word.
For Asians, right?
The other C word, you mean?
Yeah, the hole in armor, right?
Look, I don't think we should be using words like that.
If it's offensive to a group, I don't think we should.
Yeah, we're not going to needlessly antagonize anyone.
You know, if they are sort of scientific words, I think that you can use scientific words to describe groups.
But as far as words that are obviously kind of insulting and derogatory, more kind of colloquial words, you know, I just think it's kind of unnecessary, right?
Yes.
But in any case, not to be a total pussy, right?
No, no, we don't needlessly antagonize anyone here.
We are offensive enough, so we don't need to prove anything.
Yeah, that is interesting.
I mean, even something like the state of Oklahoma actually could be translated as red skin.
It means red man.
It was a neologism created by a missionary, I believe, meaning red man.
Homa meaning red.
Interesting.
Yes.
So, I mean, this is every—I mean, people have joked before of, like, you know, if the name Fighting a Lion Eye is offensive, are you going to change the name of Illinois itself, which is, you know, named after the tribe?
I mean, it can kind of go down this road of infinite progress, and we might actually go down that road.
Who knows?
But—which is—it also brings up this kind of other aspect to it, which is that— You know, it is an erasure of Native American culture.
I mean, even in the kind of like trinkets you find at airports in New Mexico of like turquoise jewelry or and you can find really well done examples of that around the West, certainly out here in Montana.
You know, the kind of decor of evoking Native American art in some way in a hotel or restaurant or things like or in people's homes, you know, and that you can extend that to team names and things like that.
I think it there.
I do get that Redskin is offensive, but just erasing the Cleveland Indians and so on, it is erasing some kind of memory of these people who preexisted the white man on the North American continent.
And defined the continent and kind of defined the mythos, particularly of the West.
And I think that's actually genuinely sad.
Yeah, and it's something we should oppose, quite frankly.
Even though the term describes a racial trait, there's nothing necessarily derogatory about it, right?
So in other words, it describes a skin hue.
Who cares?
And again, I mean, implicitly it's honoring them because they're perceived as these warriors and that becomes the totem of the team in the way that in New England, the Patriots, you know, the Minuteman becomes the totem of that team.
Right.
So it's an honoring of a warrior type as a mascot.
Yeah.
Now, it is interesting to point out that the Redskins are a racist team, at least in their history.
I did look briefly at the wiki, though.
Apparently they originated in Boston, which is famous for its racist teams.
Yes, that residue, that Beantown residue never left with them.
They were the Boston Braves, and then George Prescott Marshall purchased them, or maybe even founded them in Boston, and then moved them to Washington eventually.
But yeah, it is funny.
The Red Sox have...
They were the last team in the Major League Baseball to integrate, and it's been kind of legendary even now that black players will say this, and I do believe them.
I don't think they would have any real reason to say this about the team, but the Red Sox still have the most racist fans.
If you're playing like...
Right field and you're the visiting team for the Red Sox, they'll drop the N-word by the first inning, let's say that.
But the Redskins were the last team to integrate in the National Football League.
And until the Dallas Cowboys became a team in 1960, and then 10 years later with the Atlanta Falcons and New Orleans Saints.
And I guess the Dolphins as well?
They probably entered in the 60s.
But anyway, the Redskins were the Southern franchise.
So if you were from the South, you were a Redskin fan.
And that obviously has totally changed now, but that's how it was.
And Marshall was, again, he resisted integration up to the final moment that he could by 1962.
And also when other teams were out front in this matter.
So I think there's probably a residue of that.
I was actually reading...
I wrote a long article on football a while ago, and I want to revisit it and kind of expand it.
But I was reading this book on the decline of football, and they mentioned that the Washington Post would troll the Redskins.
When they were reporting on the teams, they would say things like, the Redskins running back failed to be integrated into the other team's defense, but escaped to the end zone where he was separate but equal.
So they would kind of use this anti-segregationist memes while reporting on this football team in the Washington Post, which is something.
And, yeah, so I don't know.
I don't know the degree to which that residue has remained.
I think it probably has.
I mean, the Redskins were also the team to have the first black quarterback win a Super Bowl, Doug Williams.
So, you know, it's an interesting history.
But I think that probably does play a part, at the very least, with the attacks on the Redskins.
Yeah, I mean, that sounds – one thing I wanted – because I think it's actually a little more complex picture in Boston, even though I think it definitely has a reputation as a racist sports town.
At this point, it's probably undeserved given how sort of liberal and progressive every city has become effectively.
But, you know, it's a heavily Irish town, so a lot of the fans would have been Irish, and the Irish, I think, were more racist, and a lot of it had to do with, a lot of it was kind of a class thing, you know, less so now.
I mean, the Irish are actually a very successful ethnic group economically in the country, as it turns out.
You know, maybe it's not still the case, but among white ethnic groups, including Jews, which we'll include for this, theoretically, ostensibly, they're the most successful economically ethnic group in America.
Now, this is information from 10 to 15 years ago, so maybe that's changed, though I don't know, I can't imagine why or how it would have changed.
And also, whites in general have become so integrated.
As a group, that it's probably harder to kind of make a reading like that.
But that's just one thing I would point out.
But in any case, as it concerns sports, I read Auerbach, who was the Jewish coach of the Celtics.
Yeah, the Jewish owner and coach of the Celtics.
He was very progressive in integrating the Celtic basketball team.
Yeah.
But then they were kind of known as the white team in the Byrd era as well.
It's always kind of murky.
Oh, sure.
Yeah, yeah.
So, yeah, and again, that might, you know, and again, I think that there may be some latent element still there in Boston because Boston actually remains a relatively white city.
And ostensibly, there was an old joke among...
You know, the Brahmin, the wasps in Boston that, though they hated the Irish, at least the Irish kept the city white was one of the sort of aphorisms that developed ostensibly among the Brahmins, right?
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