South Park takes on Dan Snyder and the Washington Redskins
Preview of season premiere of South Park |
Last August I took the metro to Maryland to see the Patriots play Washington at FedEx field in preseason. I got to see Garoppolo throw his first touchdown pass and an emerging Malcolm Butler. The atmosphere was electric, with local Washington fans erupting in applause when RG3 and other home town favorite players took to the field. I also saw the term "Redskins" plastered everywhere, a term the Merriam-Webster dictionary defines as "usually offensive".
The controversy of the team name has received more attention in recent years due to sports reporters like Steven King refusing to use the term when writing articles about the team. King's stance on using the term was:
I have no idea if this is the right thing to do for the public, or the politically correct thing to do, and I'm not going to sit here and try to preach about it and tell you if you like the name you're wrong or if you hate the name you're wrong. I can just tell you how I feel: I've been increasingly bothered by using the word, and I don't want to be a part of using a name that a cross-section of our society feels is insulting
Though the coverage has peaked recently protests of the name have been organized since the 1980s. As Washington was heading to a Super Bowl in 1988 the National Congress of American Indians started a campaign against the name demmanding then owner Jack Kent Cooke to change the names to the Hogs. In 1992 over 2,000 demonstrators showed up at a Minnesota/Washington game to show their displeasure for the team name.
The Washington franchise has not remained silent in their defense of the team name. The organization created a website RedskinFacts.com which makes compelling arguemnts of how historically the term redskin was considered a proud term for native americans and shares stories of Washington fans who don't want the name to change. However, not everyone is convinced by the site.
The Washington Post did some fact checking and rated the honesty of the site Three Pinochios out of Four. Their justification for rating the site's honesty so lowly was:
For a Web site that claims to be devoted to “the facts,” the history section leaves out a lot of them, in particular the highly negative connotations — instead of “noble qualities” — that the phrase “redskin” had acquired in the decades before the name was adopted by the football team. Instead, the Web site dwells on the pre-19th century usage, and skips over the fact that one of the team’s longtime assertions — that the name was chosen in honor of the “Indian” coach — now appears to be wrong.
This is one of those cases where individual assertions might have a factual basis, but so much information is missing that a false impression is left in the mind of the reader. We wavered between Two and Three Pinocchios, but ultimately tipped toward Three. If you are going to have a Web site supposedly devoted to the facts, you can’t leave out the inconvenient ones.
Amidst the accusations of racism on one side and political correctness on the other, enter Matt Stone and Trey Parker.
The show South Park is no stranger to controversy criticizing anti-smoking efforts, mocking almost every major celebrity, accusing the NCAA of slavery and they attempted to show an image of the prophet Muhammad after a Dutch cartoonist was murdered for doing so. Based on the preview below it seems like the South Park show is taking a stand in favor of Dan Snyder's critics.
Do you believe that criticism of the Washington franchise is warranted or do you believe the team should continue it's tradition? Let us know in the comments section below.
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