Last year, the Washington, DC-based National Football League franchise (which is actually headquartered in Virginia and plays its home games in Maryland, but bear with me) finally decided, under economic pressure from sponsors, that it was time to retire its longtime nickname, a racial slur directed at American Indians.* Activists, both within and outside the American Indian community, had been advocating for the change since the 1960’s.
[* — The term “American Indian” is, to my understanding, preferred by Native peoples and many of their advocacy organizations, most notably the NCAI, National Congress of American Indians. As the word “Indian” vaguely shares an etymology with the word “indigenous,” meaning “native,” the term is effectively synonymous and interchangeable with “Native American.”]
In 2018, Major League Baseball’s Cleveland Indians decided to remove their longtime primary logo, an American Indian racial caricature nicknamed “Chief Wahoo,” from all of its on-field uniforms, accessories and equipment. Last year, the club announced that it was beginning the process of changing its name but, unlike the Washington Football Team, will continue to play as the “Indians” in 2021 and until a new name is chosen.
Numerous other major pro sports franchises whose nicknames and/or logos contain American Indian names, motifs, or iconography, including football’s two-time AFC champion Kansas City Chiefs who will play in Super Bowl LV a week from today, baseball’s Atlanta Braves, and hockey’s Chicago Blackhawks, have made no such commitments as of yet.
I am not an American Indian, so I have no business telling American Indians how they feel or should feel about the use (or appropriation) of their cultures, be it in nomenclature or visual design elements, by commercial entities such as sports franchises, summer camps, and dairies. Nor can I speak for them when someone argues to me that such use (or appropriation) is “not offensive,” or that if “Redskins” and Chief Wahoo are offensive then not only do the Chiefs and Braves have to change their names and logos, but (e.g.) the Boston Celtics logo is offensive to Irish people, and the name “New York Giants” is offensive to tall people, so those have to be changed as well.
Laying aside this particular mode of passive-aggressive false equivalence-cum-stupidity, I’ve always believed that there is a difference between what is objectively offensive, and what is merely subjectively offensive. The word “redskin” is, and has a history of being used as, a racial slur of American Indians. Moreover, Chief Wahoo is a racist caricature, or at least based on racist caricatures (see above). Accordingly, whether “Redskins” is an appropriate name, or Chief Wahoo is an appropriate logo, for a sports franchise is a separate question from whether American Indian names, visual motifs, or iconography more generally are appropriate for sports franchises and other [non-Indian-owned] businesses. Simply put, “Redskins” and Chief Wahoo are objectively offensive; “Indians” and “Chiefs,” the latter’s arrowhead logo and the Blackhawks’ Indian head logo, inter alia, may not be, although they may be subjectively offensive.
It has been suggested to me recently, here on this site, that nothing is, indeed that nothing can possibly be, objectively offensive — not even racial slurs, obscenities, or misogynistic epithets like the word for which I was recently flagged for paraphrasing Game of Thrones a bit too closely. The explanation for this was that if not everyone is offended by it, or if there’s someone somewhere who isn’t offended by it or doesn’t think it’s offensive, then its offensiveness is purely a matter of personal opinion, preference, and/or feeling, therefore it cannot possibly be (or be considered) objectively offensive and can only be deemed subjectively offensive.
This was the first time anyone ever actually argued to me, certainly on this site, that the well-known six-letter epithet beginning with “n” that racists use to refer to persons of African descent (I don’t know if I can use asterisks to mask it anymore, since I did that with the aforementioned misogynistic epithet and was flagged anyway, so let’s go with “N-word” and hope that that’s not a flaggable offense) is not objectively offensive.* I found that a little off-putting, to be frank. But I think that to argue that the N-word (e.g.) is not objectively offensive because not everyone thinks it’s offensive or feels offended by it, is to misunderstand the distinction between “objective” and “subjective” in this context.
[* — It was also the first time I’d ever seen anyone on this site resort to, in essence, “It’s OK when Black people use it” as evidence that the word is not objectively offensive.]
It is far too simplistic — and, moreover, incorrect — to limit the characterization “objective” to indisputable or universally-agreed-upon empirical facts, and consider everything else to be “subjective.” Indeed, “subjective” is the word conservatives used to use in the late ‘90s-early 2000’s for what later became the “lamestream media” and “fake news”; Fox was “objective” and everyone/everything else was “subjective” and therefore untrustworthy.* I’m reminded again of school supervisors who would insist that only multiple-choice or fill-in-the blanks tests could be graded “objectively,” and that written work product was “too subjective” and whatever grade I gave an essay, notebook, &c. could not be “objectively” justified. Which was, and is, utter hogwash. All of these arguments, in addition to being wrong, misunderstand the distinction.
[* — One former friend of mine during that time actually called Bill O’Reilly, quote, “the most objective person in the media.” Seriously.]
The place to look for understanding of the distinction between these terms and concepts is not a dictionary, but rather, and as usual, the law. In law, an “objective standard” (or “objective test”) is often referred to as a “reasonable-person standard,” viz., what would a reasonable person in like circumstances do, think, believe, understand, &c.? Whereas a “subjective standard” (or test) would ask whether the particular person actually did think, believe, understand, &c., whatever would give rise to the liability or defense at the relevant moment. Some courts distinguish these standards/tests by referring to the objective/reasonable-person standard as “societal,” i.e., based on societal expectations, what society would deem reasonable — or what society would deem offensive — as opposed to what the individual defendant (or plaintiff) actually thought or expected in that particular instance.
By way of example, consider Tucker Carlson’s recent successful defense to defamation, viz., that no reasonable person would believe that anything he says on his show is actually true. That, indeed, is the standard, going all the way back to the famous case of Jerry Falwell vs. Larry Flynt and Hustler magazine; Falwell sued and lost because no reasonable person would believe that he actually … well, you know. This is an objective standard; the possibility that someone, somewhere, might actually believe anything Tucker Carlson says (or take Hustler cartoons literally), even if the plaintiff could produce such a person as a witness, doesn’t change the analysis, and more importantly, doesn’t make it a “subjective” question or standard.
The same applies to racial slurs, obscenities, and misogynistic epithets. These words are objectively offensive not because literally every living person agrees or thinks they’re offensive, but because we have reached a societal consensus and a societal understanding that based on their history, etymology, usage, &c., a reasonable person in our society would consider them and/or their use offensive. The fact that there are or could be persons out there who don’t consider them offensive or who aren’t offended by them is not the point, and doesn’t render their offensiveness “subjective,” let alone any less trenchant.
Nor, for that matter, does the fact that such words can be used inoffensively in certain contexts. Actor Alan Tudyk, for example, used the N-word a lot in the film 42 portraying über-racist 1947 Phillies manager Ben Chapman, relentlessly slurring Jackie Robinson (Chadwick Boseman) from the Ebbets Field dugout steps. Tudyk’s use of the word was not offensive, Chapman’s was; Tudyk’s use of the word didn’t make him a racist, Chapman’s did. The same applies to writer/director Brian Helgeland’s use of the word in the screenplay. But again, this is beside the point; the word is objectively offensive, and that kind of use doesn’t change that.
Neither does the fact that societal consensus, understanding and expectations change over time. Liberals, of all people, should understand that; it is, indeed, the essence of our project, to get society to question what it has always accepted but shouldn’t have, and shouldn’t anymore. Slavery was always wrong; segregation was always wrong; barring women from voting was always wrong; denying same-sex couples the right to marry was always wrong. The idea that anything that wasn’t widely considered offensive decades or even centuries ago can’t possibly be objectively offensive, is utterly antithetical to liberalism. It is also wrong.
Reasonable people can disagree over whether “Chiefs” or “Braves” is offensive, but not whether “Redskins,” Chief Wahoo, or the N-word is offensive. The existence of outliers, real or potential, or the fact that society may change its mind someday, is beside the point. Racial slurs, racist images, misogynistic epithets, &c., are objectively offensive.