Erasing Insults

FOR NEARLY NINETY YEARS one of America's most famous and popular football teams has been and still is named after a racial insult. Ironically, appropriately, teh team is located in the nation's capitol, the center of the power of racial oppression Tat the name is an insult, a racial slur, is indisputable, despite claims to the contrary. The name was an insult from its beginning in the eigthteenth century, was an insult throughout American history, and was certainly an insult, although a widely accepted one, when it was adopted by the team in 1933. When an insulting expression is repeated often enough, people become accustomed to it, learn to embrace it, and forget the original insult. Under great pressure, the team's owner, long intransigent, may finally acquiesce to decency and reality.As Thomas Jefferson said in the Declaration of Independence, people long accustomed to insults and abuse are far more inclined to suffer the abuse than to take action to remedy it. In the same document, Jefferson, a strident racist himself, referred to native Americans as "merciless savages" upon which the term 'redskin' is arguably a vast, if dubious improvement in terms of decency and respect. Jefferson would probably have agreed that people are inclined by nature to become merciless when their lands and livelihoods are being stolen, and their culture destroyed by a violent people who claim to represent "civilization". People who engage in insulting behavior almost always defend their words and actions, and refuse to acknowledge their own need to change. They re therefore fortunate that society tends, over time, to lean towards justice and decency, long though the process of social evolution normally takes.