November 11, 2015
Page 17
VETERAN’S DAY
Special Edition
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O PINION
Racial Slurs Have No Place in Football
Our rights still
aren’t fully
recognized
J udith l e b lanC
The
leaves
are
changing. The scent of
pumpkin spice lattes is
in the air. In short, it’s
football season. And
like millions of my fel-
low Americans, I love
football.
But I’m also American Indian.
So for me, football season
also means hearing a racial slur
all the time. It’s used by sports
teams around the country — and
by Washington, D.C.’s National
Football League team in partic-
ular.
You may know that franchise
as the Redskins. I refer to it as the
R-word.
Natives have been calling on
by
sports teams to do away with the
slur for 50 years, along with other
mocking mascots and racist car-
icatures of Natives employed by
teams of all kinds.
Professional outfits
should know better,
but so should schools
and communities.
So I celebrat-
ed recently, along
with much of Indi-
an Country, when
California Gov. Jer-
ry Brown signed the California
Racial Mascots Act into law. It
banned the state’s public schools
from using the R-word to name
sports teams. Schools in four Cal-
ifornia counties will soon have to
rebrand their buildings, logos,
uniforms, and mascots.
We cannot change history or
erase the past,” said Dahkota
Kicking Bear Brown, president
of Native Education Raising
Dedicated Students. “But today,
as Native students, we shall cel-
ebrate this step in the right direc-
tion of improving our educational
experiences.”
I agree. Now if we can just
convince our nation’s leaders to
do the same.
My hope faded, though, when
I heard Republican presiden-
tial candidate Jeb Bush use the
R-word not once, not twice, but
three times during an interview
in October. Then there’s GOP
candidate Donald Trump, who
proclaimed that Indians are “ex-
tremely proud” of the term.
Wrong.
For Native children, the
R-word and its associated mas-
cots are demeaning and disparag-
ing, eroding their self-confidence
and self-image. Unsurprisingly,
peer-reviewed studies have sug-
gested that racist mascots can
hurt the performance of Native
students.
It’s an additional mockery for
an already suffering group of
young people whose second-lead-
ing cause of death is suicide. And
it’s an added insult to people
whose treaty rights are still being
violated, even today.
Native Americans are regular-
ly confronted with attempts to
turn our sacred religious lands
over to corporations for profit.
In Oak Flat, Ariz., some 2,400
acres of national forest land —
protected since 1955 as Apache
sacred land — is being handed
over to Resolution Copper, a
British-Australian mining con-
glomerate.
Meanwhile Natives contin-
ue to protest the Keystone XL
pipeline, which would funnel
oil mined from tar sands nearly
1,800 miles from Alberta, Cana-
da to the Gulf of Mexico through
multiple sovereign Indian territo-
ries. The U.S. government never
negotiated with the tribes when
charting the pipeline, despite the
impact it will have on their lands.
And in spite of long-standing
poverty, gross health disparities
between Natives and non-Na-
tives, and ongoing discrimina-
tion, federal funding for Indian
health care, housing, and educa-
tion programs remains paltry.
Most people have the good
sense not to use the R-word to our
faces. So why would you plaster
it across a stadium?
Dropping the R-word alone
won’t solve these deep crises in
Indian country. But it’s a crucial
step toward restoring the equi-
ty, dignity, and democracy taken
from the first people of this land.
At the very least, it’ll let us all
get back to enjoying football —
without the nasty reminder that
the rights of American Indians
still aren’t fully recognized.
Judith Le Blanc is the director
of the Native Organizers Alliance
and member of the Caddo Tribe of
Oklahoma.
Contributing to the Crisis Our Children Face
The need to
break our silence
M arian w right e delMan
It is time for adults of every
race and income group to break
our silence about the pervasive
breakdown of moral, family, and
community values, to place our
children first in our lives, and to
struggle to model the behavior we
want our children to learn.
School children don’t need one
more “Officer Slam” as some stu-
dents referred to the white South
Carolina school resource offi-
cer who recently shamed the na-
tion with his violent ejection of
a 16-year-old black female from
her classroom for a nonviolent of-
fense.
The last thing children need is
violent assaults in schools which
ought to be safe havens, and a sus-
pension, expulsion and arrest to
blot their school records and push
them closer to the prison pipeline.
And the very last thing children
need is out-of-control adults using
violence as a way of resolving dif-
ferences.
I am often asked what’s wrong
with our children and I almost
always answer, adults are what’s
wrong. We tell our children to
control themselves while slap-
ping and spanking and ejecting
them violently in our homes, child
care centers, schools, detention
by
facilities and prisons. Adults tell
children to be honest while lying
and cheating and not to be violent
while marketing and glorifying vi-
olence.
I urge every parent, adult, ed-
ucator, faith and public leader to
conduct a personal audit to deter-
mine whether we are contributing
to the crisis our children face or to
the solutions they urgently need.
And if we are not a part of the
solution, we are a part of the prob-
lem and need to do better.
Our children don’t
need or expect us to be
perfect. They do need
and expect us to be
honest, to admit and
correct our mistakes,
and to share our strug-
gles about the mean-
ings and responsibilities of faith,
parenthood, citizenship, and life.
Before we can pull up the moral
weeds of violence, materialism,
and greed in our society that are
strangling so many of our young,
we must pull up the moral weeds
in our own backyards and educa-
tional institutions. So many chil-
dren are confused about what is
right and wrong because so many
adults talk right and do wrong in
our personal, professional, and
public lives.
If we are not supporting a child
we brought into the world as a fa-
ther or mother with attention, time,
love, discipline, and the teaching
of values, then we are a part of the
problem rather than the solution to
the family breakdown today that is
leaving so many children at risk.
If we are abusing tobacco, al-
cohol or other drugs while telling
our children not to, then we are a
part of the problem rather than the
solution in our overly addicted so-
ciety.
If we have unlocked and load-
ed guns in our home and cars, and
rely on them to feel safe and pow-
erful, and don’t stand up to those
who market guns to our
children and to those
who kill our children
with guns, or glamor-
ize violence as fun, en-
tertaining, and normal,
then we are part of the
problem rather than the
solution to the escalating war of
American against American, fam-
ily member against family mem-
ber, and children against adults
and adults against children that is
tearing us apart.
If we profess to be people of
faith and send rather than take our
children to worship and religious
education services, and believe
that the Sermon on the Mount,
Ten Commandments, the Koran,
or whatever religious beliefs we
hold, pertain only to one-day wor-
ship but not to Monday through
Sunday home, professional, and
political life, then we are a part of
the problem rather than the solu-
tion to the spiritual famine and hy-
pocrisy plaguing America today.
If we tell, snicker, or wink at
racial, gender, religious, or ethnic
jokes or engage in or acquiesce
in any practices intended to di-
minish rather than enhance other
human beings, then we are con-
tributing to the proliferating voic-
es of racial and ethnic division
and intolerance staining our land
again. Let’s not fight the civil war
or repeat the worst lessons of our
past. Let’s prepare for the future
in an irreversibly interconnected
world that is majority non-white
and poor.
If we think being American is
about how much we can get rather
than about how much we can give
and share to help all our children
get a healthy, fair, and safe start
in life, and sucessful transition
to college and productive work
in our boastfully wealthy nation
and are unable and unwilling to
support the poor among us then
we are a part of the problem rather
than the solution.
If we or our organizations are
spending more money on alcohol
and entertainment than on schol-
arships, books, tutoring, rites of
passage, and mentoring programs
for youths, then we are a part of
the problem rather than the solu-
tion to ensuring positive alterna-
tives to the streets and drug deal-
ers for children.
If we’d rather talk the talk
than walk the walk to the voting
booths, school board meetings,
political forums, PTA, congrega-
tion and community meetings to
organize community and political
support on all sides of the aisle for
our children, then we are a part of
the problem rather than the solu-
tion.
If we are not voting and hold-
ing political leaders at every level
and in every party accountable for
investing relative pennies in qual-
ity early childhood opportunities,
education, housing for homeless
children and jobs – jobs with dig-
nity and decent wages – and bil-
lions in the military budget, and
for cutting investments for poor
mothers and children while pro-
tecting massive government wel-
fare for rich farmers and over-paid
corporate executives, then we are
a part of the problem rather than
the solution to the undemocratic
unjust and growing gap between
rich and poor.
And if we think we have ours
and don’t owe any time or money
or effort to lend a hand to vote-
less, voiceless, hungry, home-
less, miseducated, neglected and
abused children, then we are a
part of the problem rather than the
solution to the fraying social fab-
ric and violence and uncertainty
that threatens all Americans.
Marian Wright Edelman is
president of the Children’s De-
fense Fund.