No Fox News, 'Redskin' is not a 'Term of Respect', but a Term of Historical Racism

Leave it to Fox News pundits to make a Hail Mary pass regarding racism in the NFL.

The hosts of Fox News’ “Outnumbered” surely remind you of the rich parents that discuss political issues during a passive-aggressive game of golf at the local country club. This time, however, the game was football and the cheap shot was taken toward Native Americans. The bigoted discussion group, comprised of four white people, one black woman, and zero Native Americans, criticized the issue of the racist terminology used by the Washington Redskins football team on Monday in an effort to blame the topic on oversensitive Americans, and not blatant racism. Hint: the entire “news” segment was blatantly racist.

Beginning the argument after cutting off fellow news pundit Harris Faulkner, Jedediah Bila interrupts by stating that “offensive is very subjective” in order to mock the concept of racism and, ultimately, the demeaning, degrading, and dehumanizing circumstances it comes with. Sandra Smith, who is shown starting off in the above clip, claims the involvement of the Senate, as well as the issue is its entirety, is a “joke,” especially since it is an issue “every single year.” The flawed poll described by Pete Hegseth, that didn’t exclusively involve Native Americans, was used as a crutch to justify the racist slur and his stance on American traditionalism: if it’s been around for so long, why change it now?

Apparently, working with ice cream as a teenager exempts one from innate white privilege.
Via nymag.com

It’s a conservative mindset that excuses this type of socially acceptable racism and turns a blind eye to oppression. When a white person claims that a racist slur is in fact empowering, and in this case “a term of respect,” they are diminishing the value of a person of color’s opinion and asserting their own as right; it is a completely flagrant, yet ignorantly unintentional, demonstration of being the oppressor.

The issue with this discussion, and the “Outnumbered” segment and entire Fox News channel, is that it features mainly white news pundits that denounce racism, sexism, classism, and homophobia on the daily without insight from those who are actually oppressed. While this is entirely problematic in and of  itself, the main issue here is white privilege, and how easily privileged whites denounce it. On May 15th, Bill O’Reilly exempted himself from the term white privilege because he insisted that he “worked in Carvel, painted houses, cut lawns” while growing up in Long Island, and even associated the term with literal paleness, commenting on how he “was in Hawaii last week” and “couldn’t go in the sun.” This is not a demonstration of lack of white privilege, this is a demonstration on how skin burns when subjected to ultraviolet sun rays.

Although the Redskin’s president, who is also a white male, announced in a letter to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid that the football team’s nickname is “respectful” toward Native Americans, how much more can racism be defined and demeaned by oppressors? Racism is built on the concept of oppression, and without this oppression, there can be no racism. This is why terms such as “reverse racism” are non-logical and silly because blacks and other oppressed races do not hold structural, political, and sociocultural power over whites; this isn’t a new concept, it’s a historical one, and that’s the issue. It’s a concept that demonstrates power dynamics, not prejudice.

The term “redskin” does hold racist connotations and that’s why it does deserve to be reformed, despite critique from non-Native Americans, especially whites. Whether or not the oppressive term is still used or not is irrelevant, and whether or not a handful of Native Americans consider the term harmful is irrelevant as well, because a few do not represent the majority of the oppressed race. This is not an argument of oversensitivity, this is an argument of institutionalized racism, and further demeaning its oppressive history because it is not viewed as personally offensive to white people is the real issue on of this debate. Only the oppressed can call a foul on this issue, not the oppressors.