A Heated Linguistic Debate: What Makes ‘Redskins’ a Slur?

Growing up as a member of the Gila River Indian Community in Arizona, Brian Howard attended an elementary school that was within the boundaries of Phoenix and beyond those of his reservation. There, in the third grade, he was first called “redskin.”

Did the white classmate intend it as a term of endearment, akin to buddy? Or was it used as a verbal fist, intended to hurt and to sting?

“A slur,” said Mr. Howard, 28, a legislative associate for the National Congress of American Indians. “Oh, yeah. Yes.”

But the widespread acceptance of the term as a pejorative — “now considered by many to be an offensive term,” according to Webster’s New World College Dictionary — has apparently been tossed into linguistic uncertainty by a recent Washington Post poll that centers on the name of a certain Washington-based professional football team.

Suddenly, the poll seems to suggest, “redskin” is not so bad after all, raising the question of how society should decide what constitutes a slur. After all, if the would-be victims of the term are not offended, then. …

According to the poll, nine of 10 Native Americans said they took no offense in the name of the Washington Redskins, a contentious, litigious issue that has pitted so-called anti-name advocates against the team’s owner, Daniel Snyder, and Roger Goodell, the commissioner of the National Football League.

In addition, the poll — a survey of 504 people across the country — found that more than 70 percent of those questioned said they did not consider “redskin” to be disrespectful to Native Americans.

What’s more, 80 percent said they would not be offended if called that name by someone who was not an American Indian. (An interesting follow-up might be to spend a day or two at, say, the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota, walking up to random members of the Oglala Lakota community and calling them “redskin” — and recording how well that goes over.)

The poll’s results have been interpreted as some kind of vindication for Mr. Snyder. It also led to a humbling admission by Robert McCartney, a longtime Washington Post journalist who had written many opinion articles calling on his favorite football team to drop the name, which he considered a racial slur.

While acknowledging that he remains “deeply uncomfortable” with the term, Mr. McCartney said that “it’s unsettling to learn now that I vented all that energy and passion on behalf of such a small fraction of the Native American population.”

The connotation of words can evolve over time. Not long ago, for example, “queer” was considered a pejorative for gays and lesbians; now it has become what linguists call a reclaimed epithet — a word adopted by a group in empowering defiance.

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