Judge Sides With Redskins in Team Name Suit

[Schneed10]

Originally Posted by itvnetop

If you've read any of these books, I'd doubt you'd call them ridiculous. Go ahead and ignore the correlation between their past decimation and the resulting outcome (seen in the state of the general NA population today). I wouldn't call the Native American tribes "weak" as being the reason they don't stand up for themselves. If you'd taken the time to read anything regarding their current state in this country, you wouldn't use a poll to dismiss the lack of outcry. You have the audacity to call my statements "convoluted nonsense" and "desperate", yet you'll take one poll's numbers over hundreds of years of history, nearly every dictionary's inclusion of the word "offensive" (in the definition of "redskins") and tons of books/research that discuss the Native American experience... all which provide the very reasons why we aren't able to see a noticeable movement on their behalf.

I'm not desperately grasping at anything... I'm adding to a discussion. If you polled African-Americans in the 50s, I'm guessing the overwhelming majority weren't offended at the term "colored" back then either. Are you saying we have to wait until some future point in time where the polls will reflect otherwise for NAs? *Although, I'd like to fast forward to such a time in order to see if your stance on our team's name was really, in fact, dictated by poll numbers. The term "redskins" isn't really even borderline in today's non-football vernacular. Quite the opposite, the majority of dictionary publishers, English professors and most citizens (in general) cite an offensiveness with this term when used to describe the Native American people. Why do we have to wait until there's some type of government-sponsored poll of Native Americans to do the right thing? Several universities have already reversed their long-standing traditions... they've waken up. As a society, we make the conscious decision to render words obsolete- we don't have to wait until the offending group deems it so.

But feel free to continue responding to something you don't agree with using emotional pejoratives... everything's black and white, right?

You'd have to explain the math of this to me, I'm not quite getting it. So a book, written by one person, is supposed to carry more weight than one person's vote in a poll? Why? Because it's a book??

In the end, a book is one author's point of view.

When a poll is conducted by an Ivy League institution, you can rest assured that the population was sampled in a sufficiently random manner. Meaning when you sample 768 people in a random manner, you get a conclusive result that can be used to approximate the sentiments of the Native American population in general. And I think it's pretty safe to say that this poll does not carry a 50%+ margin of error - the overwhelming response of 90% - 10% says it all. I recognize most people don't understand statistical sampling and how it can be a true barometer for a population's sentiments - I can give a math lesson if you wish. To suggest that this poll means nothing because it only sampled a small portion of Native Americans is to completely dismiss the mathematical foundation for nearly every scientific and sociological research endeavor over the last 100 years.

Here's my question. Who the eff cares about what someone said in a book?? I've got a brain of my own, I don't need to read a book to be told what to think. I can consider the other side's point of view on my own, objectively, without reading these opinions. A book is one man's opinion - for every book you mention I can probably find a book with the opposing viewpoint. Mathematics, however, are cut and dry.