What's in a name?

More than a year ago, the murders of nine members of the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C., triggered debate about use of the Confederate flag. Eventually, that flag was removed from South Carolina’s Capitol. That flag, many argued, is a symbol of racism, not just Southern heritage.

Symbols evoke feeling and have great power. So, too, do names.

 

 

In “The Anti-Redskin” (The Atlantic, October), Ariel Sabar writes about the ongoing movement to eliminate the use of “Redskins” as a mascot for sports teams. While this movement has been going on for some time, it has heated up in the last couple of years in reference to Washington, D.C.’s NFL team, the Redskins.

Leading that move, writes Sabar, is Ray Halbritter, the leader of the Oneida Indian Nation. Drawing on his tribe’s wealth, Halbritter, a graduate of Harvard Law School and owner of a casino in upstate New York, has launched “Change the Mascot, a campaign of radio ads, polls, opposition research, academic studies, YouTube videos, Twitter hashtags and media interviews.”

Since the late 1960s, Native American activists have been saying that the Redskins’ name is a slur, but they got little attention. Now, powerful people are speaking out. Sabar lists them: “Marquee sports journalists such as Bob Costas said they would stop using the name, as did more than a dozen news outlets and the editorial board of … The Washington Post; civil-rights groups and sports figures came out against it; 50 U.S. senators signed a letter to NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell …; and the Patent and Trademark Office revoked six of the team’s registered trademarks, calling them ‘disparaging.’ ”

Why the difference in attention? Money. Halbritter’s wealth buys media access.

Sabar visited Halbritter and heard a story that helps explain his passion for this cause. In 1976, his aunt and uncle burned to death in their trailer as calls to the City of Oneida Fire Department went unanswered. That, writes Sabar, “was the crisis that sapped the last of Halbritter’s faith in outsiders.”

Two weeks after the fire, the Oneidas opened a bingo hall. Over the next few decades, the tribe diversified into other businesses, including video production, marina management, journalism and sausage making. “Oneida Nation Enterprises, the commercial empire Halbritter founded and leads as CEO, is one of the largest employers in central New York,” Sabar writes.

In early 2013, Halbritter heard about high-school students in nearby Cooperstown, N.Y., pressing school officials to drop their team’s long-standing name, the Redskins. These were white kids in an overwhelmingly white town taking a stand. He offered Cooperstown $10,000 for new athletic uniforms. The school accepted and changed its name to the Hawkeyes.

Soon he took on the NFL team with Change the Mascot. He hired a Yale-trained psychologist to publicize peer-reviewed studies showing that American Indian caricatures lower young Indians’ sense of self-worth and possibility, which, Halbritter argues, “abets the cycles of poverty, alcoholism and suicide.”

Since 2013, at least a dozen schools around the United States have dropped the Redskins name, including Goshen (Ind.) Community Schools. (Halbritter considers the names Indians and Braves a lower priority because neither is “a dictionary-defined racial slur.”)

Other racial slurs have become taboo, but somehow “redskin” has not. At least not yet. Now that may be changing.

Halbritter thinks change will come, he told students at Harvard, “because a critical mass of Americans will no longer tolerate, patronize and cheer on bigotry.”

Let's hope so.