Reconstruction Vol. 11, No. 4

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“Braves on the Warpath! Fight for old Dixie!”: The R*dskins and Racialized Masculinities / C. Richard King

Abstract: This essay charts the intersections of race and gender animating the creation and contestation of Native American mascots with special reference to the Washington R*dskins. It argues such mascots cannot be understood without gender and that particular attention must be paid to the production of racialized masculinities in association with them.

Keywords: Gender, Sex & Sexuality; Race & Ethnicity; Sport

<1> By all accountants at the time, country music star Kenny Chesney gave a masterful performance in Philadelphia in June 2013, at once powerful and intimate. Nevertheless, save for those in attendance, the concert either remained unknown or quickly faded from memory, that is, until a brief video surfaced at the end of July. The clip featured a drunken and enraged Riley Cooper, a wide receiver for the Philadelphia Eagles, exclaiming “I will jump this fence and fight every n*gger here” when denied backstage access, which apparently had been granted to some other members of the team who had credentials. Once public, a predictable spectacle swiftly engulfed the outburst with fans, players, and pundits expressing outrage, indignation, and embarrassment, along with excuses, explanations, and equivocations. Cooper apologized to the public and his teammates, the Eagles condemned and fined him an undisclosed amount, mandating he attend counseling, and the NFL denounced the outburst, while reiterating its commitment to diversity, but took no further punitive action.

<2> Cooper’s diatribe was the latest in series of very public utterances of the n-word in the first half of 2013: celebrity chef Paula Deene lost her gig on the Food Network and a series of endorsement deals when it was revealed she had used the term; radio personality Rush Limbaugh, who seemingly reveled in courting controversy once more, asserted his right to employ it amid George Zimmerman’s trial (since African Americans were); and comedian Tim Allen lamented the ways in which individual sensitivities and identity politics around the word had negatively impacted the entertainment industry, disenfranchising white performers like himself. No, Cooper was not alone. In fact, to read comments expressed by his defenders via tweets and online posts, one might conclude that for a large segment of white America such language is not only ubiquitous but also understandable, maybe even acceptable. Cooper, along with Deene, reveals the deep tensions at the heart of the post-civil rights era in the U.S.: race no longer matters in society a committed to (the idea of) colorblindness, but racism thrives beneath the surface. His outburst illuminates what happens when the codes and mores deemed acceptable in private become public, or, as Leslie Houts Picca and Joe R. Feagin (2007) would say, what happens when backstage behaviors find their way to the center of social life. Moreover, Cooper underscores the conceit and privilege anchoring whiteness today. Like Allen and Limbaugh, his use of the n-word pivots on a perceived slight, a felt hurt, an imagined loss of entitlement, which can be reclaimed by seizing on the invective and putting things, bodies, and subjects back in their proper place. Defenders of Cooper (whose apology and actions after the public revelation suggest he would prefer not to speak for him) underscore the force of this structure of feeling. Thus, while undoubtedly minor and ephemeral, the incident offers a fairly sad commentary the regular workings of race and power.

<3> Significantly, reducing the outburst to white privilege, the afterlife of white racism, and the familiar dance of white-black relations in the early 21st century, of course, overlooks other crucial dynamics. Indeed, for all of the talk about what was said and what it means two issues remain largely undiscussed.

<4> First, even as fans, players, administrators, the league, and sport media expressed outrage about the utterance and its import, they took-for-granted, repeated, and even celebrated another racial slur—r*dskin, which happens to be the moniker of the NFL franchise located in the US capitol and longtime rival of the Philadelphia Eagles (see Steinberg, 2013). To put it plainly, whereas the n-word is bad, cannot be uttered, and sparks certain outrage, the r-word is good, can be repeated often, and, while increasingly contested in certain quarters, finds continual usage by virtually all media outlets that cover professional football and offers those who own the team and their corporate partners immense profits.

<5> Second, as Limbaugh, Allen, and Cooper remind us, using the n-word, and I will argue the r-word, is about the conjunction of race and gender. It is not simply white privilege but white male privilege that keeps the racial invective alive and encourages people to employ it and advocate for its continued use. These blindspots have much to tell us about the interplay of racialization and sexualization in sport and society. On one hand, they point to the marginalization of American Indians, the normalization of settler society, and the invisibility of racial power. On the other hand, this continued circulation, even as contested, reiterates the maintenance of white supremacy and the reproduction of hegemonic masculinities.

<6> In what follows, I advocate an intersectional approach to Native American mascots, arguing that one cannot understand the contours of racial politics without also appreciating the central gender politics. I draw on a rather robust literature on the uses of Indianness in American sport (Davis 1993, King, 2004, 2011, 2013, King and Springwood, 2001; Pewewardy, 1991; Spindel, 2000; Staurowsky, 1999), especially work that has underscored the ways in which the reproduction of such imagery and associated rituals perpetuate patriarchy (Williams, 2006) and quickens in response to moments of crisis like 9/11 (King, 2006). I begin with a general overview of the entanglements of race and gender in the invention, evolution, and understanding of mascots and then turn to the R*dskins.

On Mascots: Race and Gender

<7> When we talk about Native American mascots, we are talking about the entanglements of race and gender. It is easy to forget this, to prize race and racism over gender, sexuality, and (hetero)sexism. In fact, most media coverage and nearly every public conversation about the subject let gender slip, typically narrowing the focus to issues like intention, honor, offensiveness, and sentiments. I say this, I know this, and I even I slipped at a recent symposium devoted to the use of Indianness and sport held at the National Museum of the American Indian, failing to make plain, let alone raise, the centrality of these entanglements (King forthcoming). This, then, is a reminder and a rejoinder, a small insistence on the importance of intersectionality.

<8> My assertion should not surprise, for mascots (whether anchored in Indianness or not), like sport more generally, have long prized masculinity, celebrating physical prowess, aggression, and dominance. In the U.S., moreover, sport has always pivoted around discourses of white supremacy and thus has had a place in broader struggles over race and power. The play of sport and its replay in fan banter, media coverage, corporate marketing, and so on have taken the white man as its defining and ideal subject, rendering racial others as lesser, expendable, and transgressive and women to be abject, supplemental, and misplaced. Recent happenings at the NFL combine offer glimpses of this pattern: the rather overt interrogation of male sexuality, rumors and reportage of suspect character, and the mocking of the first female to participate. White men remain the default subject in sport worlds—actor, interpreter, and audience. And mascots reflect this.

<9> Following Stanley Eitzen and Maxine Baca Zinn, and as discussed in my forthcoming book Unsettling America, we can detail at least five variations on sexism at the heart of Native American mascot and monikers:

(a) taking a non-sexist male team name and adding “lady” (e.g., Lady Indians);

(b) double gender marking (Lady Chocs when the men are Choctaws);

(c) male name with female modifier (Lady Braves);

(d) paired polarity (Warriors/Squaws); and

(e) use of feminine suffix for women’s teams (Redskinette Cheerleaders).

Such practices suggest that women are secondary, supplemental, dependent, and lesser. Men are the central actors: The norm. They literally degrade women and, importantly demarcate the kinds of roles to which they might aspire. The use of racialized words, most notably “squaw,” can intensify the injuries associated with team names, precisely because they simultaneously inscribe ethnic stereotypes and gender norms.

<10> Importantly, sport as we know it crystallized in response to crises around masculinity and modernity, particularly a perceived softening of the American male and a more general feminization of American culture. Indianness offered white youth a means to recapture a more natural, truer manhood, as exemplified by organizations like the Boy Scouts. Indigenous masculinities, as imagined by EuroAmerican boys and men, then unfolded as a creative space of reinvention, a pliable and performative domain at once productive, pleasurable, powerful, and ultimately profitable. Indianness offered athletes, coaches, bands, boosters, and reporters a ready language of masculinity, a means to translate and transcribe fierceness, bravery, and honor while affirming the core attributes associated with whiteness and America, including freedom, independence, sacrifice, and strength.

<11> As a consequence, Native American mascots have very little to do with Native Americans. They do not, nay cannot, represent indigenous men and women. Much like blackface, such inventions and imaginings, meant to represent EuroAmerican men, tell us much more about EuroAmerican men and their perceptions, preconceptions, and preoccupations: how they understand themselves, how they interpret the world around them, and how they want others to see them. They reflect and reinforce the fundamental features of racial and gendered privilege in a settler society, particularly a sense of entitlement to take and remake without consent and to do so without the burden of history, the challenges of knowing, or the risk of penalty. Two examples clarify this interplay between race, gender, and power.

<12> One, mascots, as the etymology would suggest, are masks, allowing EuroAmericans, especially white men, the capacity to put on Indianness as if it were a costume. Photographs of students who portrayed Willie Wampum at Marquette University some 50 years ago capture this pattern. At the height of his popularity, the mascot, representing the school and its Golden Warriors, was a white male student dressed in fringed buckskins and donning an oversized paper-mache head, sometimes with ridiculously large sunglasses or an oversized tomahawk. Images from the sideline have something of a carnivalesque feel, the football field as a kind of heterotopic space, a zone of frivolity and liminality made possible by imagined indigenous masculinity that empowered white male student athletes and a white patriarchal public sphere more generally. Arguably more telling are the backstage photos, in which the student performers pose partially undressed, for instance, with the exaggerated head beside them. Some may say unbecoming in their unbecoming, the images offer no pretense and offer a simple summary of pleasure, power, and possibilities in a simpler moment, at a time when neither the assumptions of the settler state nor its supporting ideas about gender and sexuality, were questioned or perhaps even questionable.

<13> Two, at every Florida State University home football game, a white student playing at being Osceola, leader of the Seminole resistance to white encroachment, rides onto the playing field and throws a flaming spear at mid-field. The proud freedom fighter electrifies the crowd and reaffirms hegemonic formulations of whiteness, masculinity, and Americanness. For the fans to go wild and FSU to stage the ritual entrance, all must forget or more likely not know that Osceola was regarded by many of his EuroAmerican contemporaries as a terrorist and after he was put to death for having the temerity to defend his land and people parts of his remains were taken as souvenirs.

<14> In this context, Native Americans mascots are not unlike trophies, remnants from a kill, longingly kept reminders of past glory, and continuing signs of their prowess and superiority through which EuroAmericans channel the strength and energy of those they (or better said, their forbearers) have vanquished. Such conjurings, of course, depend on disfigurement and dehumanization, transmogrifications that have reduced an abject and imagined other to cypher and stereotype. Warriors, Chiefs, and Braves have a generic appeal, embodying the ideals of white masculinity on the plain of battle and the field of play, namely bravery, bellicosity, strength, aggression, leadership, and comraderie. Qualities amplified in more extreme monikers like Savages and Redskins that replace nobility with intensity, animalism, terror, and brutality, are elements understood to be part of the masculine ideal as well, best understood perhaps as darker complements. Together, these renderings of what Robert Berkhofer dubbed the “white man’s Indian” provide the raw materials for making men and for making masculinity meaningful. They anchor character building and individual aspiration, bind teams and communities to one another, anchoring them in time and place, map the world and one’s location in it, and bring social distinctions and cultural values to life.

<15> Such distortions, which are themselves acts of violence, encourage fans, students, reporters, artists, and performers to perpetuate more base and brutal assaults. The rivalry between the University of North Dakota (formerly the Fighting Sioux) and North Dakota State University (The Bison) offers an instructive and disturbing set of lessons about the entanglements of race, gender, and violence. Like many intense rivalries, supporters routinely mock the other side, often by putting down opponents through the use of off color humor, unsettling allusions, and overt sexualization. It was not uncommon to hear fans of chant “Sioux Suck,” as NDSU fans did last year with glee after besting their interstate rival in hockey.

<16> More disturbing, but in keeping with this sentiment and entitlement, NDSU boosters in the early 1990s created a pair of t-shirts which, though denounced, remain the source of banter on fan web forums. One features a variation on the NDSU logo (a bison) above a caricature of Plains Indian man with his mouth agape and sandwiched between the phrase “Sioux Suck” (see here: http://www..photobucket.com/). Another version places the imagined Indian on his knees and reads “Blow us. We saw, they sucked, we came” (see here: http://www.photobucket.com/). During this same period, a t-shirt appeared with a grotesque image of a Plains Indian copulating with a buffalo: “Buck the Bison” it read (see here: http://www.bluecorncomics.com/). And, an anonymous creative artist defaced an older rendering of the UND logo, painting bright red lipstick on the Indian in headdress once used by the institution and branding its centenary as “A Century of Sucking” (see here: http://www.und.nodak.edu). These images require little unpacking. They use established claims to indigenous masculinity to mock UND, its sports team, and its fan base, while mocking indigenous people in crass language and ugly imagery. While unsanctioned, such iterations and their continued celebration underscore in the starkest terms how mascots foster hostile environments, and how gender and race work together to create moving and meaningful icons for schools and teams as well as the interplay of race, gender, and violence animating them.

Hail to the R*dskins?

<17> The Washington professional football franchise began in Boston in 1932 and shared a name with local baseball team, the Braves. A year later the team changed its name to R*dskins and relocated to the nation’s capital in 1937. The franchise, the NFL, and many fans claim with increased frequency and volume that the team honors American Indians and was in fact bestowed upon the team during the brief tenure of coach William “Lone Star” Dietz, who identified himself as a Sioux. Much of the criticism of the team rightly directs attention at its name, its perpetuation of stereotypes, and its well-documented history of racism. As noted above, r*dskin is a racial slur, which appears to have benign origins before becoming a derogatory and dehumanizing reference for American Indians. Like all such mascots, its iconography trades in ahistorical archetypes still common throughout popular culture. And, long before the NFL expanded to have teams in Atlanta, Dallas, and New Orleans, the DC franchise positioned itself as the team of the South. It famously was the last NFL team to integrate and then only in response to federal pressure to do so (Smith). As owner George Preston Marshall, who also chose the name of the team, remarked at the time in a manner eerily reminiscent of many modern assessment of race and power today: “We'll start signing Negroes when the Harlem Globetrotters start signing whites” (quoted in ZIrin & Zill, 2013). The franchise has successfully put this ugly history behind it and built itself into one of the most valuable professional teams in the U.S.. A more intersectional reading offers a deeper, more complex critique of the team.

<18> In many ways, as likely surprises no one, the R*dskins are all about men. Football is among the most pronounced articulations of hegemonic masculinity in the U.S. The centrality of violence, domination, and conquest give material form to ideals like assertiveness, strength, decisiveness, hierarchy, and (self)control. Indianness accentuates and extends their expression on the playing field and their emulation by countless fans in the stands and on the streets. In turn, women in the form of the cheer squad, the Redskinettes, in turn put gender norms and roles in stark relief and clearly illustrate the findings of Eitzen and Baca discussed previously. This gendered crucible plays a foundational role in the creation and contestation of the team name.

<19> In common with many teams with American Indian mascots, the R*dskins emerged out a context that romanticized indigenous masculinity and celebrated white men playing Indian. Lone Star Dietz, who famously was the inspiration for the team name, lived his adult life as an American Indian, but in fact was a fraud, taking the impersonation of indigenous people beyond the momentary rituals associated with scouting, fraternal organizations, and theater performances to craft a false persona. Linda Waggoner (2013) has demonstrated that Dietz was in fact not a Native American, undermining the origin myth and with it much of the justification for employing the racial slur. That Dietz “passed” and so many (then and now) embraced him as an American Indian underscores the ease with which EuroAmerican men could fashion their identities as white men by taking and remaking elements of indigenous culture (regalia, names, stories, and so forth). The willingness of so many to continue to believe a lie communicates something very deep about settler society, namely the lasting force, value, and utility of stereotypes about native men and the power and privilege non-Indian men enjoy to use those stereotypes to stage themselves for the world.

<20> While I have suggested that football is noteworthy for the manner in which it sanctions a largely homosocial, hypermasculine space, the original owner of the team, George Marshall, sought to attract women and families to the games, believe that the presence of more women would increase the attendance of men as well. To this end, he seized upon the marching band as the perfect set piece and recruited some 150 members to form it in 1937 (Peterseim). In the process, he sought to create a heteronormative ideal of sorts: the sporting spectacle set to a bombastic soundtrack and dressed in feathers, gave purpose, order, and meaning to white team, white family, and white nation.

<21> The hallmark of the team and its symphonic signature would debut the following year. “Hail to the Redskins” articulated many of the reigning ideas about race and gender. The song with its line “Braves on the Warpath” celebrated and claimed indigenous masculinity for the team and its fans, encoding it like the Indian head aside the team’s helmet as a trophy and a totem (as discuss more generally above)—romantic, stoic, brave, defeated, and repossessed. To underscore the intense savagery at once desirable and detestable, it cast vanquishing the opponent as scalping and employed broken English to drive the point home (“We will take 'em big score”). Again, white masculinity has secured and centered itself through projections of indigenous masculinity as race and gender giving meaning to the R*dskins. And, the assertion that the team “Fight for old Dixie” makes plain the shape and scope of whiteness. Importantly, “Hail to the Redskins” has changed over time. As Peterseim notes Where today's song cheers fans to "Fight for old D.C.!" the original version's "Fight for old Dixie!" played directly to the fans' Southern identity. And while the Redskins still use a racial slur for their team name, some words in the original fight song didn't do much to deflect accusations of racism. Where the song now says, "Beat 'em, swamp 'em, touchdown! -- Let the points soar!" it once went, "Scalp 'em, swamp 'em -- We will take 'em big score / Read 'em, weep 'em, touchdown! -- We want heap more!" The lyrics were subsequently cleaned up in the '60s, after Marshall's Redskins were, notoriously in 1962, the last pro team to integrate. The racial slur remains but the reference to Dixie has faded away; the broken English has been edited, beautified much like the origin story and evolving rationale. One of course wonders why if these elements can be reconfigured why the team name and associated iconography cannot be.

<22> For much of its history, the R*dskins did not dwell on the team name. It was only after American Indians, community leaders in D.C, and analysts began raising questions about the name did the team move to justify the origins of the name and excuse its continued use. Much as the lyrics of the song were altered slightly to erase the legacies of racism, so too arguments were made that allowed fans, the media, the players, and the ownership to feel good about the team and about themselves. Indeed, this was a crucial move of rehabilitation and protection in an era in which the charge of racism could besmirch one’s character (here Riley Cooper offers a cautionary illustration). These arguments, in other words, allow men to continue to see themselves and project to others that they are in fact good and decent men, upstanding citizens, unburdened by biases and untainted by the ill will associated with racism. To this end, supporters of the R*dskins underscore intention (over and against effect), honor, and veneration.

<23> To be a good man today means that one is not overtly racist and one does not intentionally say or do things that others might deem as racist. This truism is especially true of those who support the D.C. NFL franchise. League Commissioner Roger Goddell gave voice to this principle in response to a letter from members of the U.S. Congress who wrote him suggesting the team name was demeaning and should be changed:

The Washington Redskins name has thus from its origin represented a positive meaning distinct from any disparagement that could be viewed in some other context…For the team's millions of fans and customers, who represent one of America's most ethnically and geographically diverse fan bases, the name is a unifying force that stands for strength, courage, pride and respect (quoted in NFL Commissioner).

In other words, the name is positive despite what you may have heard—because we say it is. And if you do not believe us, we will (as the franchise has done) point to high schools in the U.S. with similar mascots (the name is in keeping with American values) and indigenous people who endorse the name—as in the case of a man parading before the media as a full-blooded Inuit Chief, but who was neither a chief nor full-blooded (McKenna, 2013)

<24> Many supporters clothe this argument in the language found in the team song and familiar from much of popular culture: we are warriors celebrating the greatness of indigenous warriors. Loren Smith said as much in an editorial earlier this year,

The Redskins name is a salute directed at the warriors who protected many American Indian tribes. The fact that racism, war and murder have taken such an enormous toll on Native Americans throughout American history does not diminish the bravery of the Indian fighters of long ago. It would be a shame, and in fact an insult to their memory, for the Redskins' name to be consigned to the scrap heap of history. (2013)

The R*dskins become a kind of mnemonic device that insists we remember indigenous people and enable supporters to disassociate themselves from ongoing racism. Importantly, even some opposed to the R*dskins embrace the warrior as a template for a reworked team name and concept (see http://whiteskins.org/).

<25> In accentuating the positive (not unlike Disney did in Pocahontas) allows support to simultaneously honor indigenous people and be honorable men. Joe Theismann, former quarterback for the D.C. franchise, recently came out with a strong endorsement for the team

I was very proud to play for the Washington Redskins, and I did it to honor native people in that regard. I think sometimes people perceive words in their own particular way. What happens, what Mr. Snyder decides to do is totally up to him. I can just tell you that when I put that uniform on, and I put that helmet on with the Redskin logo on it, I felt like I was representing more than the Washington Redskins. I was representing the great Native American nations that exist in this country (Theismann)

As a casual fan alive when he led the team, I cannot say I ever heard Theismann speak of Native Americans, let alone claim he took the field to venerate them.

<26> Of course all good men, reigning ideas about masculinity dictate, when approached unreasonably or confronted with false accusation, will push back, offering a non-negotiable bottom line. So it is with owner Dan Snyder who apparently has tired of the lawsuits and the public criticism. Thus, he declared in May: "We will never change the name of the team. It's that simple. NEVER — you can use caps” (Snyder; see also Jones, Kogod). Much like Limbuagh and Allen, who pushed back when told they could not or should use the N-word, Snyder, an embattled white man, exerts control over the racial slur, claiming it as his own. In doing so, he seeks not only to quiet debate but also to stablizie his power and privilege in a moment of crisis. Ironically, it may be in this extreme space in which the fragility of racial/gendered power may be most clear, even if the hope for change to anti-Indianism and hegemonic masculinities seem so elusive.

Conclusions

<27> I have sought here to identify some of the key articulations of race and gender that surround the continued use of Indianness in sport generally and the Washington R*dskins specifically. In a very real and largely unrecognized way, the struggle over Native American mascots is a struggle over white heteronormative masculinity. The challenge posed by Native American mascots, then, is not simply to get people to unlearn racist stereotypes and acknowledged the dignity and humanity of indigenous people, nor to cultivate deeper understandings of the foundations of the U.S. as settler state—though accomplishing one or both of these objectives would be amazing. No, to really undo the vitality of American Indian imagery and sport, we most appreciate the centrality of gender and sexuality and foster an appreciation of intersectionality. In doing so, we can begin to envision an alternate future for the team, perhaps not unlike that articulated by Gregg Doyel, CBS Sports columnist (quoted in Steinberg, epmaphsis original):

“There’s gonna come a time – I don’t know when it is, 20 years, 40 years, whenever – there’s gonna come a time when people are gonna look back and say can you believe those idiots thought Redskins was appropriate?” he said. “That day is coming, because the Redskins will be so far removed from the NFL you’re gonna need a microscope to find it. It’s here for now, but it won’t be for long.”

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Zirin, Dave & Zach Zill. (2013). A History Lesson for the Redskins Owner. The Nation. http://www.thenation.com/.

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