The Washington Redskins

By the 1930’s, professional football was all the rage.  Wanting to get in on the action, a businessman in Boston named George Marshall founded a new team called the Boston Braves, which he creatively named after a baseball team with the same name which shared the same stadium.  The baseball Boston Braves were named in honor of Tammany Hall, a political organization that dominated New York City politics, which in turn was named after a Native American chief named Tamanend, who had been pretty chill towards the white guys who founded Philadelphia.  Confused yet?  Good.  Anyways, Marshall needed a logo for his team.  Being a lazy bastard, he just copied the picture on the nickels of the time, which had a random Native American head on one side and a buffalo on the other.  You can probably guess which side of the coin Marshall picked.  Unfortunately for Marshall, nobody seemed to give a shit about his new football team.  Convinced that sharing a name with a baseball team was just too confusing, because people often get baseball and football confused, he decided to change the name.  The name he chose was the Redskins, mostly because he could save a bunch of money if he didn’t have to change the logo.  The change in names did little to help the team, which was soon after moved to the nation’s capital where they became the Washington Redskins.

Now during this time things were not all that rosy for actual Native Americans.  The tribes were all living on reservations and it was common practice to take native children from their parents to be educated at boarding schools where they would learn to be more white.  So yeah, just a bit fucked up.  However, mixing together children from a myriad of tribes did have the positive affect of giving a sense of Native Americans being a group rather than just a bunch of tribes.  This eventually led to the creation of the National Congress of American Indians (NCAI) in the 1940’s.  The NCAI mostly concentrated on some pretty big issues unrelated to this story, but they also fought against the use of negative Native American caricatures.  Such as calling your team the Redskins and promoting it via a myriad of terrible stereotypes.  Unfortunately, nobody gave a shit, at least until the 1960’s when the Civil Rights movement made an increasingly large number of white people aware that maybe treating entire groups of people like shit wasn’t all that awesome.

The use of negative caricatures became a bit of a big deal, so much so that the Redskins decided that it might just be best to sidestep the issue.  In 1965, they changed their logo to a spear, and then later a big letter R with some feathers on it.  However, they didn’t change their name.  This lasted until about 1971, when deciding they missed their old logo, the Redskins went to the NCAI and asked for permission to start using it again.  Amazingly enough, rather than telling the Redskins to fuck off, the NCAI instead decided to give their approval, apparently being happy with the whole thing as long as it was done in a respectful manner.  It was a controversial move, especially within the Native American community, but overall it mollified the angry white people who mostly moved on to be outraged over whatever the new thing to be outraged over was.

It’s probably worth stopping real quick here to ask where the hell the term redskin came from given that Native Americans most definitely are not red.  Well, originally a tribe in what is now known as the southeastern U.S. called itself the red people, a name derived from the tribe’s creation myth.  The Europeans of the time, who were all about simplistic color coordinated differentiation, just kind of took this and made it a common term for all Native Americans, which made no sense whatsoever.  Whether or not the term is racist has been debated ever since, but it has been widely used by racist people, which is really not a point in its favor.  However, such debates were largely ignored in relation to the Washington Redskins until the 1990’s when a group of Native Americans sued to have the team’s trademark removed under a law that said people couldn’t trademark racist terms.  The natives originally won in 1999, but the decision was overturned in 2005 under a technicality that basically centered around the fact that all of the plaintiffs had been adults in 1971, meaning that if they had a problem they should’ve brought it up then.  To get around this, a younger group of Native Americans sued in 2014, and again the trademark was removed.

It was at this time that The Slants entered the picture.  The Slants were an Asian-American band who wanted to trademark their name.  However, the government denied them the right to do so stating that the term was totally racist and that The Slants were bad people for wanting to have such a trademark.  This didn’t sit well with The Slants, who appealed the decision all the way to the Supreme Court, which found in a unanimous decision in 2017 that trademarks are free speech protected under the First Amendment.  The basis of the argument was that it was not the government’s place to decide what speech was offensive and what was not.  As a result of this decision, the Washington Redskins got their trademark back, though of course it is still controversial as fuck.

Image: https://www.flickr.com/photos/watts_photos/35529575433

My Dad Is Genetically Superior To Your Dad Part 3

To understand the fucked up things that happened next, one must also understand that throughout the earliest twentieth century there was a widely held belief that humankind was on the brink of a Malthusian collapse.  Rapid increases in the consumption of natural resources, caused by rapid population growth and industrialization, was expected to outstrip the ability of the planet to produce said resources by the second half of the century.  While many believed that such issues could be overcome by embracing scientific progress, many others contended that the self-destruction of society was inevitable.  All the progress that had been made in the preceding centuries would be lost as the world was swallowed by famine, plagues, and warfare.  Such thinking helped spur on a new age of imperialism at the end of the nineteenth century, with countries vying to claim as much territory as possible to ensure they controlled enough resources to survive the coming cataclysm.  The belief by many that such conflict was inevitable was what turned the belief system of eugenics from another terrible point in history to one of the most horrifying chapters of all time.

The economic collapse which became known as the Great Depression rattled every bit of society.  Eugenics was not immune.  With so many once wealthy and successful people cast down into what they once would’ve considered poverty, people began to more greatly question the idea of economic value being a proxy for human worth.  However, many of the larger ideas of eugenics had become so embedded that they were hard to shake off.  The Great Depression was also seen by many Malthusians to be the start of the long expected societal collapse.  As a result, some people began to meld the theory of evolution and the ideas of eugenics with the overall idea of a nation-state.  Whereas in many nations the rise of nationalism was centered on the idea of moral superiority, these thinkers added in the idea of genetic superiority as well.  As in nature, only the strong survived, which meant that it was okay to do anything in order guarantee the continued existence of the nation.  While supporters of such ideas remained the minority in most countries, in others, such as Germany and Japan, they became the dominant force with terrible consequences.

For both Germany and Japan, the starting of World War II was an effort to secure enough land and resources to guarantee the survival and expansion of each country’s declared master race.  In the case of the Japanese, the view of other groups as being inferior resulted in the murder of around 6 million people in China and southeastern Asia via civilian massacres.  Germany, as we all know, was much worse.  Germany was the culmination of the ultimate idea of eugenics.  From the moment the Nazis took control of Germany, they began a policy of ethnic cleansing that increased in brutality and efficiency as time went on, eventually resulting in the establishment of death camps to do away with the undesirables.  This list included Jews, Roma, the disabled, gay men, Poles, and Slavs.  Some 17 million people were estimated to have been killed directly by the Nazis, with millions more killed by policies that restricted food and medicine to those deemed less than human.  It was to be just the beginning.  Plans for after the war called for depopulating huge areas for future German expansion.  Though eventually won by the Allies, World War II resulted in the death of some 85 million people, four percent of the world population.

The horrors of the war, combined with the terrors revealed during the Nuremberg Trials, ended the widespread belief in the need for eugenics.  The once lauded ideas that had shaped the world, began to crumble and fall away over the next several decades, replaced by an increased sense of the sanctity of an individual’s right to exist.  This helped push forward many movements, including the end of Imperialism and many Civil Rights movements. Beginning in the Great Depression, and really hitting its stride in the 1950’s, new research better highlighted the importance of environment on human development.  Genetic research eventually showed no major differences between the genetic codes of people of different nationalities and races.  Though many of the policies once supported by the eugenics movement have been swept away, the after effects of the era continue to haunt global society to this day.

Image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Reichsparteitag_N%C3%BCrnberg_Ansichtskarte_1937_NSDAP_Propaganda_Richard_BORRMEISTER_Verlag_Photo_Hoffmann_M%C3%BCnchen_Hitlerjunge_Hitlerjugend_Fahne_Hitler_Youth_Nazi_Rally_Nuremberg_Castle_Postcard_No_known_copyright_restrictions_866426-0.jpg

My Dad Is Genetically Superior To Your Dad Part 2

In the early twentieth century, eugenics was a rapidly growing and accepted science in the world of the intellectuals.  Thanks to money and support from the rich and powerful, most major universities had programs for eugenics research and many organizations worked to sway public opinion in favor of its teachings.  Thanks to the idea of eugenics, the wealthy and successful no longer had to feel bad for those beneath them, for their right to their stations in life was preordained by evolution and provable by science.  After all, if two wealthy and successful people had a child, wouldn’t that child also turn out to be wealthy and successful?  Such was the popular thinking of the time.  Of course, not all people were quite so convinced by such so-called research, but you can probably guess which side got the lion’s share of the research funding.

As part of the so-called great leap forward, many pro-eugenic scientists and organizations began pushing for policies that would put their beliefs into practice.  The first target were the mentally handicapped and insane.  As studies began to show that mental illness could be passed down to later generations, laws began to be passed allowing for the forced sterilization of those in state mental institutions.  One of the first countries to adopt such policies was the United States, with California at the forefront of new eugenic laws, but such policies quickly spread across most of the developed world.  Eugenics was seen as a progressive cause, with its main opponent being the Catholic church, which ironically argued against the movement on the basis that the body was sacred and that control of one’s body should lie with the individual.  In some countries, including some U.S. states, sterilization policies were eventually expanded to include people with low IQs, criminals, and in some cases those born with genetic physical disabilities.

As time went on, the eugenics movement quickly expanded to judging entire groups of people as inferior rather than just certain individuals.  According to research just as flawed as everything else the eugenicists produced, entire races of people were genetically inferior, as could be shown by their level of economic development.  It should come as no surprise which racial groups got the shitty end of that stick.  Such racist beliefs had been around long before eugenics, but with the so-called trials of scientific rigor suddenly applied, it became much more okay to push through some truly shitty laws and policies.

What followed was a truly insane amount of circular thinking.  For most countries in Europe and North America, the widespread belief in eugenics raised concerns over racial purity.  These claims were used to pass numerous racist, segregationist, and anti-immigrant laws.  The purpose of these laws was to keep the blood lines of the so-called Nordic race, people whose ancestors came from western and northern Europe, as pure as possible.  It was all exactly as fucked up as it sounds. Similar policies were followed in Japan, though of course those policies focused on the idea of the genetic superiority of Japanese people over everybody else.  In Brazil, things took a decidedly different turn, with the dominant white minority enacting eugenic policies meant to encourage intermarriage in order to breed out the declared bad traits of the black population.  Similar policies were enacted in Australia regarding its aborigine population.

As the idea of eugenics became more mainstream throughout the developed world, its claims became much more widely believed.  Raising the quality of a country’s genetic stock was seen as paramount for not only its continued existence, but for the overall success of humankind.  The embracing of eugenics was seen as the final shaking off of the old rituals of the past in order to embrace the shining golden age of a scientific future.  It was seen as human civilization breaking itself free of the shackles of the natural world, taking control of its own evolution.  Those deemed unfit would be left behind, the harm to them not mattering since they were of inferior stock anyways.  Few other ideas have ever sprouted so much evil.

Image: https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernst_Sch%C3%A4fer#/media/File:Bundesarchiv_Bild_135-KB-15-089,_Tibetexpediton,_Anthropometrische_Untersuchungen.jpg