June 19, 2014

If it were a potato...

Yesterday, during the height of the hoopla surrounding the U.S. Patent Office refusal to renew the patent on the racist NFL name of Washington, D.C.'s hometown team, one of the media (Fox's Lisa Kennedy Montgomery aka Kennedy of MTV fame) argued that the term "redskins" isn't as offensive as the "n-word" and that by comparing the two, you are "minimizing" the impact of the latter.
Bullshit.
First of all, who the hell are you to decide which racial slur is less offensive? And secondly, as Josh Marshall points out, "this sort of mascotization comes out of a history of domination, dehumanization, and romanticization." The name dehumanizes, as all racial slurs are intended to. Those who continue to lobby for these teams perpetuate the oppression. 

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