Redskins: Insult and Brand by C. Richard King (review)

The highly charged cover of C. Richard King’s new book lists blacked out but still readable racial epithets such as “niggers,” “chinks,” and “wetbacks” above the clearly printed word “redskins.” Yet within the book’s text, King himself never spells out “redskins,” instead opting for “r*dskins” unless he is directly quoting someone else’s use of the word. A professor of comparative ethnic studies at Washington State University, King starts from a fixed position: the word “redskin” is a racial epithet, and the NFL’s Washington Redskins should change their name.

Redskins: Insult and Brand is both an academic tract and a polemic, offering synthesis and theoretical analysis complemented by some original research. The bedrock of King’s work is explaining why “redskin” is an epithet, and how apologists for the team have it wrong. The author is perhaps most effective when dismantling arguments by the word’s defenders. Indeed, it is difficult to come away with any regard for open racists such as former Redskins owner George Preston Marshall, or even contemporary apologists like ESPN and former Sports Illustrated sportswriter Rick Reilly, who published an apologia that so misrepresented his own father-in-law (Blackfeet tribal member Bob Burns), that Burns felt compelled to publish a rebuttal. Such head-shaking moments are sprinkled throughout the book. For those who already deem the word an insult, King’s explanations still offer a nice compendium of the many reasons; those in denial need to read carefully and with an open mind.

While Redskins is entirely dedicated to grappling with one overriding issue, its organization is not always stable. Over eleven chapters, the book bounces across various topics, sometimes a bit erratically, resulting in sub-sections that occasionally seem more like a collection of research notes turned into prose than a synthesized narrative. And while King covers many angles, just about all of them stem from race, his area of specialization. This allows for some historical work, but those hoping for analyses of factors such as class, politics, or economics will find the book wanting.

Redskins was published in 2016, so it does not cover more recent developments such as the infamous and flawed Washington Post poll that found a vast majority of Native people supposedly are not offended by the word “redskin” in general, much less the team name, or the US Supreme Court’s unanimous decision in Metal v. Tam (2017), which gutted the Lanham Act, the federal law that had previously precluded the Patent and Trademark Office from registering racially disparaging names such as “Redskins” (the case specific to the football team is still under appeal in a separate case).

King does broach the larger issue of divisions among Native people in several ways. First, in a chapter called “Simulation,” he looks at false images of Native support for the Washington Redskins name, such as white people playing Indian. Here he ably critiques instances when team owner Daniel Snyder has cynically bribed some Indians to publicly support, or at least to downplay concerns about, the team’s name. Snyder eventually founded an opportunistic and self-serving charity called the Original Americans Foundation as a way to institutionalize his efforts at racial manipulation through purchasing goodwill.

Beyond unpacking such distortions and exploitation, King directly addresses the authentic if overstated divisions among Indigenous people in the chapter entitled “Opinions.” He does a good job of exposing and challenging the false equivalencies and false dichotomies promoted by polls such as the Post’s, even when they’re executed with sound methodology, which they never seem to be. “Opinions” is among the book’s strongest chapters, as King points out that “too often, Native American opinion matters only because of how whites might use it. It cannot be heard in its original voice, terms, or context” (142).

The penultimate chapter, “Changes,” stresses activism as a path to raising public consciousness, highlighting the work and words of various activists and organizations, including many from the Midwest. However...