The time may be at hand to reconsider the Washington Redskins

I've never been one for the perpetuation of political correctness. Though well intended in its infancy (conceived to help break through immovable, and undeniable, barriers foisted upon minorities in decades past), it has, since its mainstream rise in the 1990s, taken its charge a bit too far down the path of righteousness, and become a pejorative used to describe someone - or something - that is too sensitive, too uptight, too reserved, at the expense truth, or worse, humor. Humor is a big factor in the universe unfolding as it should, and also largely what distinguishes us from the rest of the animal kingdom. God forbid we ever all stop laughing.

But while that's all very true, it's also true that I'm a white, Midwestern heterosexual male who, all things considered, has lived a charmed life. I have never been openly discriminated against. Never felt the burn of distrustful eyes cast on me simply because I walked into a public place. I've never had my ethnicity used against me, or watched as the color of my skin, or the habits or traditions of my forefathers, got turned into a punch line. Doubtless many of my own ancestors, at least on my dad's side of the family (which, for reference, probably looked something like Fiddler on the Roof) suffered at some point, but I, personally, never have. Have I encountered (reverse) racism; yes, certainly. Some people in every race and creed are going to act like morons. That's not the same as facing institutionalized discrimination.

All the talk lately about the prospect of changing the NFL team Washington Redskins to something different, something less offensive, has got me thinking about the late great George Carlin, who once said that we think in language, so the quality of our thoughts can only be as good as the quality of the language we speak.

He's right, we do think in language, and a move on Washington's part to change the 75-year-old team name would not be unprecedented. Other high school, college and professional sports teams who have come under pressure to change their insensitive names have either complied, or attempted to shift the meaning of the word in question. My beloved Atlanta Braves, for instance, trotted out a new motto this year: Always Brave. I don't know where that came from, or whose idea it was, but it seems to be an attempt to distance the franchise from anything Native American. Brave is a state of mind, the motto suggests, not an ethnicity.

The Atlanta Braves have been my team since the early 1980s. They are the Atlanta Braves, deeply rooted in three decades worth of my psyche, and it would be hard - not impossible, but hard - to adjust to a new team name. It would be like following a whole new team. This would be equally true if they stayed the Braves but moved to a different city, became, say, the Jacksonville Braves. In my mind, they're not the Jacksonville Braves any more than they're the Atlanta Spirit, or Atlanta Big Blue...they're the 'Atlanta Braves'....Words mean things; names mean things, which is why you don't name a kitten unless you're sure you can keep it. I learned that the hard way when I was eleven, devastated as my dad and I drove Clubber - a stray I'd found in our garage - to the animal shelter.

The brass in the Atlanta organization cleverly figured out a way to mitigate any  negative connotation associated with 'Braves' by drawing on a positive attribute that is inherent in the word, even when it remains racially motivated. It is a bit of a stretch to suggest  'Braves' just means brave, as in courageous, what with the 'Tomahawk Chop' helping to galvanize the Atlanta crowd over the last twenty years (with drum song playing in the background, no less). But if enough people read 'Always Brave', and enough time goes by, eventually that will become what people think of.

Words mean things. Good or bad, they have a way of getting into our blood.

Unfortunately, it's not so easy for Washington. Bob Costas' two-minute editorial on the issue during Sunday Night Football last month was right on the money: there is simply no way to regard the word 'redskin' as anything but a slur, no way to reinvent it to mean something else. And frankly, the fact that the city in question is Washington D.C., the fountain from which much heartache for Native tribes has flowed over the last 200 years, makes it especially awkward. 

Then there's the Redskins logo, which seals the deal as far as I'm concerned. It's an Indian caricature only slightly less offensive (or would be, if I were Native American...) than the Cleveland Indians' Chief Wahoo. There's at least a kind of nobility evident in the Redskins logo. 'Wahoo' is a wide-toothed entity sporting an exaggerated shit-eating grin and - literally - red skin, with a feather stuck in his head.

Every fiber of my being wants to dismiss it: It is what it is, I want to tell myself, as I do so much else in life. Relax! It's just baseball! It's not inherently racist. It's funny. It's cute. It's a cartoon. Don't take everything so seriously!

But that's because I am a white, Midwestern heterosexual male. I'm not a Native American. I don't have to look at that grotesquely disproportionate visage and think I see myself in it, or that a vast majority of people in this country see me that way.

To speak nothing of the word 'Wahoo' itself...

Political correctness can run amok surely, and should be practiced by degrees. I think we can do this. I think we are smart enough as a society, as a species, to discern what is legitimately offensive and what's a ludicrous tilting at windmills, like calling that thing in the road a 'personhole cover' (thank you, Mr. Carlin...) or the animal rights group PETA petitioning the town of Fishkill, New York to change its name to something that doesn't suggest violence toward fish. That actually happened in the 1990s, and in my opinion was a flagrant waste of good letter stock paper, an abuse of time that could have been spent more productively sleeping.

We are clever enough to know when it's time to re-think the way we think. We are clever enough to control, by degrees, the quality of our thoughts as they are expressed in our words. And given what's been going on in Washington lately, any number of relevant replacements for 'Redskins' abound:

The Washington Shutdowns?

Washington Gridlock?

The Washington Big Fail?

Big Green?