The National Congress of American Indians launches PSA aimed at ‘Redskins’ NFL team to influence name change via goodness Mfg
The National Congress of American Indians (NCAI) has just released a two-minute public service announcement (PSA) called “Proud To Be” that takes aim at the long-standing use of the term “Redskins” by the National Football League team based in Washington D.C. via goodness Manufacturing.
The hard-hitting PSA is an artistic and educational statement, a collage of native American images throughout history and a tribute to the proud heritage of tribal names, including Cherokee, Navajo and Blackhawk.
The PSA is an attempt to correct the popular misconception that “Redskins” is an acceptable and original Indian name when it is in fact a long-standing derogatory reference to native Americans, who refer to it as the “R-word.”
In December 2013, the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human rights, a coalition of over 200 national organizations, joined the NCAI by passing a resolution calling on the NFL team to change its name. “Proud To Be” was created by the NCAI in collaboration with goodness Manufacturing to increase public awareness of this important issue.
5 Comments
I’ve gone mad.
Let’s imagine you’re English, and the football team from Liverpool, your home town, owned by a wealthy American who can call the team anything he wants is re-named The Limey Bastards, or you’re an Aussie and the Super 15 side in your hometown of Sydney gets purchased by a wealthy man from China who loves rugby and he names it The Criminals, because he can, or you’re an NRL fan and a wealthy Kiwi, who shall go unnamed, purchases the team in Redfern and decides to name it the Abos.
How long do you think that any of these owners would live? You can use a stop watch to calculate the answer, ’cause it’s less than a minute.
You probably are mad, and thick, and insensitive, and just Right of Attila the Hun, and, well you get the point . . . but likely you don’t, mate, and that is the point.
Your analogies don’t hold water, my, naive young friend. The team has not been re-named, nor has it anything to do with ownership by an, insensitive wealthy new oligarch as his personal plaything. The Redskins has been the name of that team for approximately 100 years. It. At the time the team was named, Redskins was not a perjorative term. It was not chosen to incite or provoke, unlike your examples. Another flaw in your rant. And as to your adversarial tone in addressing me, might I suggest that if you take an opposing position in an argument, that you use persuasion instead of personal insults. That, my friend, is what we do in advertising. And you never know who you’re attacking in forums such as this. Maybe someone much wiser, more experienced and more literate than you.
I thought the term American Indian was pejorative these days too?
Follow the Australian model and just call everybody ‘mate’. No risk of offending anyone. Well, no risk until some twat on twitter creates a hashtag and tweets their ‘outrarge’ at being called ‘mate’, creating a social media storm. Meanwhile, being charged $16.50 for their skinny flat organic wholegrain vegan latté doesn’t even raise an eyebrow.
The term Redskin has always been pejorative to Native Americans, and you display both ignorance and prejudice by claiming otherwise.
The analogies we’re not intended to be exact copies of the circumstances in DC, but hypotheticals of how a slur to another culture in the name of their revered sports franchise would be viewed. Sorry you weren’t able to follow.
As far as advertising goes, provocation is one of the best tools to use when you want to get a resistant audience’s attention, and it seems to have worked just fine with you.
It’s always amusing to see how clumsily defensive and inarticulate a reactionary becomes when his indefensible and vulgar opinions are attacked. The knee jerk ‘that’s just political correctness’ claim is in the end laughable, but it doesn’t seem to stop the human road blocks to any progressive thought from pulling it out of their hind quarters whenever their delecate sensibilities are offended by people trying to correct a historical wrong.
Back to the pub, mate, and tell the boys all about it.