Seattle Times Bans Use of the Word 'Redskins

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It’s time to ban the use of “Redskins,” the absurd, offensive and outdated name of the NFL team in Washington, D.C.

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The Times joins other publications and writers that have stopped using (or severely limited use of ) the word, including the Kansas City Star, the Portland Oregonian, the Orange County Register, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Salt Lake Tribune, Washington City Paper, DCist, Slate, Mother Jones, The New Republic, Peter King, and sportswriters in Buffalo and Philadelphia.

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Redskin, he learned, had not emerged first in English or any European language. The English term, in fact, derived from Native American phrases involving the color red in combination with terms for flesh, skin, and man. These phrases were part of a racial vocabulary that Indians often used to designate themselves in opposition to others whom they (like the Europeans) called black, white, and so on.


But the language into which those terms for Indians were first translated was French. The tribes among whom the proto forms of redskin first appeared lived in the area of the upper Mississippi River called Illinois country. Their extensive contact with French-speaking colonists, before the French pulled out of North America, led to these phrases being translated, in the 1760s, more or less literally as peau-rouge and only then into English as redskin. It bears mentioning that many such translators were mixed-blood Indians.

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Of course, the names of many peoples who have been at war have been used with an intention to demonize or denigrate. That we can find Germans spoken of with malice during World War II, though, does not make German slang or offensive. But the informal usage of redskin seems to have made it especially inviting to the creators of frontier tales.

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Thanks for the link. A couple interesting points were made for sure...

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