Don't play into the disinformation about the Redskins being a derogatory term. Multiple studies by etymologists showed that it wasn't. In fact outright forgeries and fabrications were used to convince people that it was a derogatory term. And yes the media often supported that misinformation even when presented with information debunking the claims. That the name was dropped at all was an injustice (Maybe not a grave injustice given what happens in the world but an injustice none-the-less).
https://slate.com/human-interest/201...s-history.html
Couple of Examples
"....Before all this recent scholarship, though, one could be forgiven for thinking redskin had emerged from hostilities with the white man. For many years the first citation in the Oxford English Dictionary was dated 1699 and purported to come from Samuel Smith. It read, “Ye firste Meetinge House was solid mayde to withstande ye wicked onsaults of ye Red Skins.” It had been quoted from family papers in a book published in 1900 by Helen Evertson Smith.
But Goddard’s research undermined this earliest of citations. First, he explains, Smith’s words were “relentlessly antiqued”—made to appear older than they were. One giveaway was the use of ye, which was anachronistic for 1699. By investigating the underlying documentation Goddard further discovered a probable source for the quotation, bearing a different date and the word Indian, which Helen Evertson Smith had modified to redskin...."
"....the Post published a column by Eva Rodriguez, trotting out the bloody-scalp origin story. Goddard responded by writing a letter to the editor. First, he stated clearly that only current feelings about the word were relevant to determining whether redskin is offensive today, and then he objected strenuously to Rodriguez’s amateur scholarship:
What is not acceptable is for her to give as the only relevant historical fact the fictional claim that the word originally referred to scalps, for which there is no evidence.
But the Post’s letters editor would not allow Goddard to call the bloody-scalp claim “fictional,” and so deleted the word from his letter...."
https://law.marquette.edu/facultyblo...-so-offensive/
"....There is little evidence that the perception of “redskin” as an inherently offensive term for Native American existed before the late 1970’s or early 1980’s. Traditionally, the word “redskin” was viewed as a synonym for Indian or Native American and did not carry the sort of negative connotations that have long attached to ethnic slurs like ...." (I stopped the quote at this point to avoid any possible term violations)
05-13-2024, 08:08 PM
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