A football team by any other name

How difficult can it be?

It took a marathon school board meeting. It followed months of divisive debate, including two student walkouts. It came after the student newspaper opted for change for similar reasons.

“It” is another high school dropping its longtime “Redskins” mascot, with this one in Idaho proving a particularly contentious exercise.

Hm. Maybe we could shorten these exercises with a new plan: all teams named “Redskins” will alternate between that and “Whiteskins” every week until people get the point.

As reported by the Washington Post, Teton High School (Driggs, Idaho), which sits just outside Yellowstone Park and the Wyoming border, announced Tuesday evening it would retire its “Redskins” mascot at an undetermined date in the near future. The decision followed a formal school board vote in which four of five board members voted to discontinue the Redskins moniker, which has been in use at the school since 1929.

So it actually took the people of Driggs, Idaho 90 years to figure out that calling the high school football team a racist epithet is not a particularly useful or benign thing to do. Humans are so disappointing.

The story is from July; I hope football season isn’t being too painful for the bereft fans of the old name.

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