BROWNSVILLE BEANERS? SAN BENITO SPICS? HARLINGEN REDNECKS? NOT COOL? THEN WHY DONNA REDSKINS?

By Juan Montoya
This post came about after overhearing a rather loud complaintant at a local bar during the Monday night football game about Native American protests against the use of the term "Redskins" for sports teams such as Washington (or Donna, Texas)  Redskins, etc.
The loudest complainer was a former football jock who made light of the natives' wounded feelings when sports franchises used the pejorative term "redskins" "braves," "Indians", etc., that whites and others often use to refer to them.
I had seen an interview with a native from back East who said that the term first appeared when local governments in colonial times would place a bounty on killing natives who stood in the way of "progress" and didn't willingly submit to their rule or give up their lands or resources.
There is a movement underway for teams at all levels to stop using the names of natives and their tribes as mascots. Unlike my loud friend, I find myself agreeing with the natives on this issue.
Those of us who are old enough to remember the days of outright prejudice and racism find nothing funny about using a person's ethnicity to refer to them with disdain about their culture.
Funny how only the "redskin" term is used in sports traditionally played mainly by white (and now black and a few browns thrown in for good measure) people. I simply can't remember a team being called the Peoria Palefaces, the Chattanooga Crackers, or the Gruenge Gringos, for example. And there would be a riot if someone suggested that New Orleans name their team with the "N" word.
Hey, we're honoring your culture, dude!
One of the main objections to us changing our ways is the cost associated with changing the logos, memorabilia, stationery, etc. Those names have been used historically, they argue, and no one means anything bad as perhaps did those who coined them originally. Well, we've all used "historically" unique words that were coined to hurt people. We've had to change and it was for the better.
How much trouble could it be?
Did you hear the "redneck" comedian (I forget which one) tell the one about the hillbilly (sorry hillbillies) wife who learned that the priest who had married her was not ordained?
"Poor girl," goes the punch line, "think of all the weight she's going to have to lose."
What have we got to lose except the heavy baggage and vestiges of  a racist past?
Let me give you an example. As kids growing up in the Rio Grande Valley, we, like others all around the world probably, used to make slingshots to hunt for small animals or birds. We were ignorant of the fact that these small animals had no nutritional value, or that they filled a unique place in the food chain or ecosystem. We just wanted to kill something. In those days we used a term for the slingshot that was a combination of Spanish slang and American racism. At the time we never knew that we were using a pejorative word used against black people. In Spanish, it's called an "hulera." But in Brownsville in those days, we used to call it a "negasura." We never associated that word with the real meaning, a southern invention using a combination of the "N" word and "shooter."
Where we picked up that word, we'll  probably never know. But we used it without even thinking about its real meaning. Once we learned the true racism and the spite behind it – the idea that you didn't need a gun to shoot a black person, that he didn't rate a real weapon to put him down – the situation in our heads changed.
I've kept my kids from using slingshots as we did in the past.

Killing small animals simply for fun is no longer acceptable And they'll never use the pejorative term for black people either. As a matter of fact, they have been pretty much told that using any ethnic slur in any sense of the word doesn't fly around these here parts. I don't want to hear why Polish dogs have flat heads, why Mexicans don't have barbecues, why Chinese have slit eyes, or how many gays it takes to put on a light bulb.
To make the point, even the use of the word "indian" is a mistaken one because Columbus never got to India and called the natives he "discovered" in the Americas that mistaken term. Why continue propagating his ignorance?
People are not mascots. They are human beings. If it causes some slight inconvenience for some commercial sports enterprise or high school football team to recognize it, so be it. The costs associated with continuing to hurt people for fun are much higher.