Jacqueline Keeler: Fighting racist mascots with social media

In an interview on a Washington D.C. radio show in September, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell said, “I know the team name is part of their history and tradition, and that’s something that’s important to the redsk*ns fans. I think what we have to do though is we have to listen. If one person is offended, we have to listen.”

Well, during the Super Bowl this past weekend, there were 18,000 tweets hashtagged #NotYourMascot—many addressed to Goodall himself @nflcommish.

Some of the tweets criticized Goodall’s comments at a press conference the Friday before the Super Bowl for claiming that the term redsk*ns honors Native Americans. However, Goodell refused to answer when asked if he “would call a [Native American] a redskin to his face?” throwing doubt on whether it was an honor or simply a Jim Crow-era artifact a few are unwilling to give up. The latest study of D.C. fans found only 25 percent would be bothered by a name change.

I was one of those thousands tweeting Goodall from across the country. I had come up with the hashtag only the week before as our Facebook group Eradicating Offensive Native Mascotry faced a dilemma. Our previous hashtag #Changethename had been taken over by spammers from India (ironic, I know). So here we were a week away from the Super Bowl having to start from scratch with a new hashtag.

When we told Fans For a New Tradition (D.C. fans who support a name change) we were tweeting during the Super Bowl they asked, “Why, the Redsk*ns, aren’t playing in the Super Bowl?” The team hasn’t played in the Super Bowl since 1992, and is said to suffer under the “Harjo Curse” named after Suzan Harjo, a longtime advocate for changing the name. Part of it was simply to keep the pressure on owner Daniel Snyder, but for me, that was not the only reason. I also was inspired by the images showing up in my social media feed of Native people enthusiastically supporting their teams and sharing culture as an expression of support on their own terms.