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I vote here, perhaps it should be noted, as a long-time Washington Redskins fan.

#3 for me, if "provocative" means "annoys some activists". Polls of Native Americans show they by and large aren't offended.

I couldn't go with #4, considering the 1946-1950 version of the logo:

It was offensive in its sheer ugliness alone.

This, on the other hand, is just iconic and cartoony.

There is a solution, though. ;)

*shrug* I suppose it is to some people, but no reason to apologize to me because you think so. I'm just saying that's my cultural context.

WRT the Washington Redskins...uhh...perhaps this is insensitive for me to say, but Native American people need to get the fuck over it. Definitions change and nobody thinks of "them no-good Injuns and Redskins" anymore.

And if the Redskins either bow to pressure or are federally forced to change their name, I won't be a fan. It's a contrived "controversy" dumber than the Bullets v. Wizards (also when I stopped being a basketball fan).

I went with "Just a logo".

I feel that people who get upset with this sort of thing are seeking offense where none was intended.

With (no) respect to the Washington Redskins, since they have no offense, how can they be offensive.

_{(Runs like hell.)}

Don't really understand why that irritated you so much, since it was entirely initiated by the owner. His team, his decision.

I always found it funny as hell that there is a brand of generator called Onan. "But do they spill their electrons on the ground?"

All that matters is that the Tribe sucks worse than the Reds this year. Woo hoo! (Not Wahoo)

In Latin America and Spain there is a bread company called Bimbo.

I used to do some work for their parent company. The bottom of the corporate letterhead listed all their brands, and it was weird to see the word "Bimbo" down there.

Oh, and I picked option 3.

Yes they are the makers of Bimbo Sweetbuns.

Heh.

smacky,

Nice avatar!
But did you get hospital/patient permission?
;)

Uhh, J sub,

I'd like you to explain how the "Notre Dame Fighting Irish" is not offensive but the Washington Redskins isn't.

In fact, I'd say Fighting Irish is more offensive than Redskins, since only a small minority of Irish are habitual fighters, while nearly every person of Native American decent has a reddish/darker hue to their skin than the average cracker-ass European.

One is a behavior that varies between individuals while the other is a genetic trait dictating the levels of pigmentation in one's epidermis.

They still do. They still say "the Luck of the Irish" too.

This is derogatory however, as the Irish in the mid-to-late 1800's were thought to be dumb, lazy, useless immigrants, and anything good that happened to them was attributed to luck alone, hence the luck of the Irish.

Well, I'm 75% Irish and it doesn't bother me. ;-)
To my knowledge, Fighting Irish has never beed used as an ethnic slur. If they were the Notre Dame Paddys or Bog-Trotters it would be a different story. Redskin has a long history as a derogatory term. I don't think that's an arbitrary distinction.

Granted, if you're looking to be offended, you'll find something regardless. That's no reason to make it easy for someone.

Regarding the Red Skins, would it be ok to have the "Black Skins" or the "Brown Skins"?

Regarding the Cleveland Indians, can we have a team called the "Blacks" or the "Jews" when the team is associated with neither blacks nor Jews (as in the team owners, most of the supporters, etc)?

I switch my answer to # 2, btw. This is partly based on a discussion I had with the Native American girl I am seeing. She's partly Italian American, btw, but she's very proud of her Native American heritage and culture.

The issue is that, even though your family wasn't here, you're still benefitting from the actions of people who came before you. Your Our ancestors wouldn't have had anywhere to go or any jobs to do had it not been for the first settlers and their genocidal tendencies. In the same way that a person is responsible if they knowingly accept stolen goods, we're all somewhat responsible for the actions that emptied the continent.

Actually, no, it didn't; it happened into the middle of the last century. And even if it hadn't, we all still benefit from the actions that were taken back then. The agriculture that built our country couldn't have happened without the genocide; there would have been too many people. The prosperity we enjoy today is directly linked to what happened then, and whether you want to accept it or not, your ancestors (and by extension, you) would never have been successful if someone hadn't stolen from the Indians and given to them at a greatly subsidised price.

Or, more accurately, the more successful genocidal capabilities of my ancestors (first arrived in the 1630s) versus those of the varyingly hostile Indian Native American tribes Nations they encountered, the result being not the emptying but the filling of the continent. (With people, that is, as opposed to buffalo.)

That said, it isn't like those self-same rapacious, blood-thirsty ancestors of mine were all that hospitable and welcoming to Smacky's pasty-white ancestors. Boston was littered with signs reading "No Dogs or Irish" and Irish immigrants were often hired in the South as day laborers for jobs deemed too risky to use slaves (valuable property!) to get done. Racism is just one reason to oppress or missuse other people. In a pinch, merely having more wealth and power will suffice.

The notion that the more recently arrived European immigrants somehow arrived on balance advantaged over African Americans simply due to skin color, while not entirely preposterous, tends to be used more as a bludgeon to silence opposition to the politics of aggrieved entitlement than as a reasoned argument about the realities of race and culture in America. (I'm not saying that's how Shem is using it, just how I have more often than not experienced it being used.) It's right up there with the black woman (somehow, it's almost always a woman) saying "I know more about being white than any white person can know about being black," etc. It's a gambit to assert authority and silence opposition.

Oh, and I know we've been all over this before but, in re a statement of Smacky's above, I still don't see what is inherently racist about the term "Oriental." If I recall correctly, we last left that point noticing that there is a generational element to that failure on my part to get with the program linguistically. Still, I suppose I am similarly situated to the Southern white person of, say, 60 years ago who for the life of him couldn't understand why "Negro" was suddenly being deemed an insulting term. *shrug*

And I'm not even Irish. I'm even lower on the totem pole of white peoples, if you can believe it. I'm Slovenian. (The lowest of the low!)

Yeah, bringing up the term "Oriental" was a bad example. I should have just used a different example since I know there was a huge debate about it here. I don't even really know where I stand on that particular linguistic contention myself.

Nah, it turns out Poindexter is a little thief. If you don't watch your avatars, they'll get into trouble for sure.

It was somewhere on the on the net.

I know my ancestors were slave owners; we have documentary evidence of it. On one side, anyway - the other side was poor Lithuanian Jewish immigrants, fleeing pogroms and repression. I completely get what Shem is saying: I am richer in part because of what my ancestors did. But I'm not going to spend too much time beating myself up over it; we're all better or worse off because of what people in the past did, but that doesn't mean we bear any moral responsibility for it. There is also the issue - which caused quite an uproar when it was pointed out - that Black Americans as a population are richer and healthier than Black Africans, so in some senses they're the beneficiaries of American history too, despite its obvious inequities.

That's fine if you personally feel that way, but it's an insult to my ancestors to imply that they were "given" anything. My lineage came to America to build a life that could not be had in the old country. They worked for everything they had, and they purchased land from people here with their earnings. They are so far removed from anyone who profiteered from slaughtering the Native Americans that I don't hold them morally culpable for any of it. But I agree with you that U.S. history is dismal, and it does make me sick to think about the mistreatment of the indigenous people. Still...not the same thing as culpability.

My guess is that the various peoples Europeans found already in the New World had, themselves, fought and killed others of their own or different tribal peoples for the land. Even if they didn't, I don't buy the notion that because someone got someplace first whatever he found was his.

That said, I don't mean to come of as an apologist for the European settlers' treatment of Indians. (Why, just the other day I was making some personal reparations, a quarter at a time, at the Choctaw Nation Resort & Casino.) But whatever "original sin" the Americas are washed in, it's a sin almost certainly shared by most of those same Indian peoples and, for that matter, people everywhere. You might just as easily say that those Indian casino owners who get the benefits of Western technology (and tax free cigarettes!) are equally culpable because they, too, have reaped the advantages of my ancestors' carnage and plundering.

Er, you don't know what my family paid for their land here. Why are you assuming that any land they purchased must have necessarily been subsidized? I don't know of any subsidizations personally. When they came here, the regions they settled in were already populated and owned by "white" (and presumably wealthy) people. So why would I or you assume that they would have paid anything less than the then-current market value for land in Northeast Ohio? Subsidy would imply that the current owners had somehow cut a break for my family, and what I'm saying is they took all the profit they could want from my family, I'm sure (well, at least that's a safer and more likely assumption than the suggestion that they were somehow given a discount). By that logic, if and when I own land here and then "sell" it, I'm somehow still culpable because if the Indians' land had never been stolen, I wouldn't have had land to purchase. This is true, but still completely irrelevant to my own life in these contemporary times. Other than the lesson that I take away from the history of the U.S., which is don't be a dick and kill other people and take their stuff...but I knew that long before I studied U.S. history.

I honestly don't know. I do think they're owed something, though.

"Current market value" would have been much higher if the land hadn't been taken in a "treaty" by the government. Which is my point; no matter how much one's ancestors paid for what they have, it would have been much more expensive if the people who owned it had been able to demand what they wanted for it and tell people "screw you" if their price couldn't be met.

Actually, the price may well have been lower. Taking and holding land by military force is expensive. (Gosh, I wonder if there are any current scenarios that this observation might apply to?) Besides, the fair market price of land sometimes drops over time, too, as many a mortgage holder today has suddenly discovered. The truth is, there is simply no way of saying for sure how the price of, say, 100 acres in Oklahoma today would differ if the Indians who lived there a century or more ago had sold it off in an entirely uncoerced transaction.

If I find a piece of land, work on it, use it for my subsistence, etc, even though I am not entitled to the land, I'd be very pissed if someone kicks me out by force, takes the land and prohibits me from using it ever again.

Like Shem says, it does not make it OK if humans in the past have been barbaric and inhuman to one another.

I side with Shem on the need to "pay back" to the Natives, and African Americans. The question is "who should do the paying?" Well, I always thought that there are records of who benefited from the slave trade, slave ownership, and who used which land property taken from Indian Nations. Those individuals (and potentially the government) are the ones who should pa for any reparations, no matter how small a quantity they are able to contribute. But if they are wealthy, one can claim that their wealth could not have been made (at least not as much) had they not been involved in slavery, or taking lands *by force* from Natives.

Finally, as libertarians who find the idea of government taking our taxes immoral or whatever because we earned that income and refuse to accept the snatching of our hard earned money, how can we morally accept taking other peoples hard earned, not necessarily money, but their source of their subsistence (in the case of Indians) and their freedom (in the case of slaves). To me that sounds like a double standard.

hence, I also agree with smacky because not all Americans are responsible or benefited from the things that happened so many years ago.

Ali, were I to support the taking of land, money or property from others by force, I'd be what is commonly known as an immoral asshole. Since I don't, I consider myself to be a moral asshole. Every civilization* has been built on the bones and nourished with the blood of a previous civilization.

*There may be some Pacific Islanders to whom this does not apply.

No, it just makes the America/"this hemisphere" stuff pointedly selective. Short of the rare pioneers who walked on land no human had trod before, the answer to "why are you here?" has been "my ancestors killed/chased off/enslaved/marginalized the people who were here before" throughout the overwhelming bulk of human history - when it hasn't been "we got chased off from over there!" before they got their groove back.

J sub D- Couldn't humans move to become moral non-assholes? Part of human progress?

Honestly, Shem, and I'm not saying this to pick on you, but aren't the Masons the ones who run and profit from the government? So by that logic you're a lot more morally culpable than I am.

I'm sure that some already have. I'm too judgemental of others behavior and decisions. I don't stop them if they are only harming themselves. I don't excuse them when the chickens come home to roost. For example, people whose homes are being foreclosedf on because they took out loans with teaser intro rates and are just now finding out the idiocy of that decision, fuck 'em. It's not immoral to not rescue people from their own mistakes. It is kind of assholish to not really care though.

Aside - I think smacky should be reprimanded for using more than 64 characters in the title of a poll when she should have known it would draw so many comments. ;-)

I think screwing up a people's culture is nothing to be belittled, and it is I think on this thread. Just say the evil Muslims take over and have as a consequence smacky wear a headscarf and J sub D a long ugly beard. My guess is that it won't be taken nicely. While the US didn't force any Indian to wear, dress or do things forcefully, the whole different Native cultures were just rooted out and displaced (both geographically and culturally).

You have no basis for saying that. When you take someone whose ancestors came through Ellis Island with the clothes on their backs, or someone whose ancestors were slaves, then later oppressed sharecroppers hounded by white authority figures, and say they came out ahead because of the genocide, you've abandoned any standard by which to say contemporary Indians didn't as well.

Those individuals are dead. You won't get much from them.

Because that's how any property on this planet that's existed more than X hundred years came about. At some point, you have to stop and say, "OK, we're going to stop stealing and confiscating and conquering and retaliating and try to be fucking civilized about this." At some point, you have to abandon old grievances because the perpetrators and the victims are all dead.

Yeah, that means someone got lucky because his great-great-great-great-grandfather kicked someone else off their territory. But someone else is the ancestor of that guy's neighbor in the same territory who didn't do as well. Yet another person is much better off because his dad started a computer company in the 70s, decades after his displaced and oppressed ancestors came to America.

And yeah, maybe the fact I spent my childhood in trailer parks and cheap apartments does have to do with the misfortunes of my ancestors.

Such is life.

It isn't going to get better or more just if we try to dig up the grievances of the dead and inflict them on the living - in fact, this is a very particular way in which human beings manage to make things palpably worse and more unjust throughout the world. Blood guilt and inherited grievances are unvarnished bad things. I will absolutely oppose any variation of such things as wrong, damaging, and harmful.

I'm not owed anything because some of my ancestors were put on reservations. I don't owe anything because some of my other ancestors may have put them there. I don't get a wildcard because others came off a boat not speaking a word of English.

Yes, but then to whom should reparations be given? We're talking about 2-3 thousand year old events? In the case of slavery, Native Americans, and, say Palestinians, as with the Jews of Europe after WWII, there is a chance to fix errors because records are available I think. Who should do the fixing and how is not easy, but is doable because we have records, no?

The first Boone to set foot in America (George Boone IV, my [great x 7] grandfather) showed up in 1713. The Boones tended to live on the western edge of what would become the U.S., so are likely to have benefited directly (or pretty close to it) from any misfortune or mischief inflicted on the natives. Famed Indian killer Daniel Boone was George Boone IV's nephew, in fact, which means that if anyone has left over blood guilt for killin' Injuns, I guess it would be me.

However, as of the Great Depression at least, my family had nothing. Any financial benefit I've received from my family came about as a result of the work my grandfather and father did. We have no land, no possessions, and no monies handed down from anyone who lived prior to the mid 20th century.

I am connected to the people who took land from the Indians only through accident of history, and a particular pattern of proteins on my Y chromosome. How does this make me in any way culpable for what one group of people I never met did to another group of people I never met?

Say you're 50% European, 37.5% Black, 6.25% Native American and 6.25% Chinese. How much do various parts of you owe the other parts of you?

That's obviously problematic, but in essence, yeah.

I at least assume you'll give people a day in court...so you want to try innocent people for the actions of their ancestors.

Feh. This isn't a conversation I'm going to spend any more time on.

I at least assume you'll give people a day in court...so you want to try innocent people for the actions of their ancestors.

Feh. This isn't a conversation I'm going to spend any more time on

Why trials? It is not a penalty on the descendants. It is a purely administrative thing.

Now why not engage is a discussion. It is not like I had this particular conclusion in mind when we started off. This is a conclusion that I don't like much either. I am not pushing for anything. I am approaching this with an open mind.

The Egyptians could just give the Palestinians a chunk of real estate, call it a wash, and cut out the middle-man, too. *grin*

The Egyptians could just give the Palestinians a chunk of real estate, call it a wash, and cut out the middle-man, too. *grin*

Would you accept relocation because of an eminent domain decision? How does the saying go, "two wrongs do not make a right"? If a Palestinian possesses a proof of ownership of a piece of land or property from the early 20th century, then the property should be returned peacefully and civilly. Same applies to Jews (and Greeks who used to live in Alexandria) who were forced out of Egypt in the 50s and 60s. Definitely. It is justice to me.