The Washington Burgundy and Gold

The team Nickname is coming up again. 

I was a Redskin fan since 1969. I started as a kid. Socialized to accept the nickname.

The Nickname though means something different to some Native Americans than it does to D.C. Football fans. We are not living in an age of free speech. Authoritarians are in charge of our country and our universities. The outrage they will post should Washington revert to the Redskin nickname would be an unnecessary distraction and a valueless political mess serving no one.

I don't mean to become an apologist for the nickname. But the word Redskin seems to have emerged in the minds of white conquistadors who were irritated by Native American resistance to White Land Use improvements. A Redskin in that light was an insurrectionist. It was good to be an insurrectionist working to retard White conquest.

The same dynamic occurs in the N-Word. White mental retardation was irritated by Black Resistance to slavery so it fulminated the N-Word. Once it emanated from mule-faced anglo saxons, Black Americans took pride in the fact they were irritating the oppressors. The N-Word used among Blacks was a celebration of the essential fact that they were existentially free and the N-Word in the mouth of a white man was an unconditional surrender to that truth. 

This is why some Native Americans are not bothered by the nickname and why the N-Word can be heard among some Black Americans.

Basing your identity on your capacity to irritate others is not universally effective because not everyone is an oppressor. Nor are insults concretized incantations that wound like boulders. Insults are a form of mental weakness. In football, as in life, it is good to be mentally tough. It is better not to speak at all if all you have to say is an insult. It is not that you aren't achieving your goal of destabilizing the person whose existence you reject. Maybe you are. But you are nakedly confessing that you are stupid and weak.

But shutting you up is your job not anyone else's. Why free speech works is it allows people to say stupid things and thereby organize themselves out of the loop. At the same time it allows for the intrusion of truth and the possibility for its acceptance. You should always allow the idiot to put his idiocy on full display and the genius to warn of the oncoming train. The idiot and the genius are intertwined. 

In the present environment, everyone is an oppressor. Ignorance is universally stipulated. Language must be politically correct. Inoffensive. Overly polite to works of fiction or fantasy realities. This is why science is in deep trouble. Facts are too oppressive to be admitted. A bodyguard of lies is necessary. It is like giving yourself a lobotomy. And apparently in this age of Authoritarian Rule one is morally obligated to stupidify oneself into a complete brain fog.

The Redskin Players and Coaches were not on the whole blazing racists and Klan Rally attendees. They weren't perfect. But they had moments of social relevance and sublime moments of competitive football. The history of those moments is worth preserving. And if Authoritarian Rule disallows the use of the word "Redskin", it ought to allow an inoffensive alternative which at the same time calls to mind the rich football history of the Washington Franchise.

That nickname to me, as well as to others, is "Burgundy and Gold". It's not my invention. The players used it themselves. It was a matter of pride to put on those colors. If you wore those colors in the Seventies, Eighties, and Nineties, you were part of something special. Three decades of it.

Not a wave of racist animosity. But years of good football. 

That is what we want to get back to in Washington. A Washington football-related nickname is my preference.