What's In a Name?

On a recent radio discussion, I listened as two African-American leaders excoriated Boston as an extremely – perhaps the most – racist city in America.  Among the many strange arguments they made was that our sports teams are named the Celtics and the Patriots, and one has an Irishman on the logo and the other used to have “somebody who looks like he’s going to run me down.”  (Of course I suppose it’s racist to assume that a black man should know what a football center looks like when he’s about to snap the ball.)

            But let’s look at these cases.  The Patriots are of course the simplest.  It’s just history – you know, the Tea Party, John and Sam Adams, and all that.  By the way, none of the Massachusetts signers of the Declaration of Independence ever owned slaves, unlike 53 of the others. 

            On to the Celtics.  The team was formed in 1946, before any professional team was integrated.  Why not Celtics? After all, Minnesota has the Vikings, Dallas the Cowboys, and Texas the Rangers.  Of them all, it might be argued that Celtics is the most accurate and the least offensive.  No Viking ever reached Minnesota, and both cowboys and rangers suggest whiteness unrelated to ethnicity, even if there were black cowboys.

            Let’s take the argument further.  Most sports teams, at least until recently, were named after animals or types of people.  Among the types of people there are some apparent criminals – Raiders, Pirates, Buccaneers – some white usurpers of Native land or Indian fighters (Sooners, Buffalo Bills, Texas Rangers).  Others, and they’re a significant number, are commonly thought of as racist because they appropriate non-white group names or insults: Redskins, Indians, Chiefs, Seminoles, Blackhawks, Braves, Aztecs, Illini.  Indeed, many anti-racist groups have parodied these by suggesting names from racial or ethic slurs that would obviously never pass muster (e.g. Chicago Polacks to name just one).  Imagine if Boston or any other city decided to “honor” African-Americans by naming a team after those famous tall Africans: the Dinkas, or the Maasai.  There would quite rightly be howls of outrage, wouldn’t there?

            Finally, let’s look beyond names.  It is true that the Celtics were the last NBA team to sign a black player.  But they were the first with a black coach, the first to start an all-black team, the first to win an NBA championship with a black coach, have had three black coaches win championships (to two for the whole rest of the league combined), and have had black coaches for 20 of the 51 years since their first.  By contrast, their arch-rivals the LA Lakers have had black coaches for only five years, yet they have for years been favored by many African-Americans despite the fact that every title LA has won has been with a white coach.

            You might as well point to the subway system’s Red Line and the Harvard Crimson as evidence that Boston is a communist city.  

You're On Your Own, Folks

 

            Lots of writers have jumped on Paul Ryan’s comment that “The conceit of Obamacare is that young and healthy people are going to go into the market and pay for the older, sicker people.”  Of course that’s the definition of all health insurance, whether it’s an employee program, an insurance company pool, or even Medicare. 

            But what’s more significant is what Ryan’s comment implies about the nature of any civilized, or even sane, society.  Marxism may have been over-reaching with the slogan “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs," but it’s closer to the way the world needs to work than its opposite, whether we phrase that opposite as “to each his own,” “every man for himself,” or “God helps those who help themselves.”  (The last, by the way, is actually believed by nearly ¼ of Americans to be in the Bible.)

            Let’s look at some of the arguments that can be extrapolated from Ryan’s position:

·      “Homeowners’ insurance asks people whose homes haven’t been burned or blown away to pay for those whose homes have.”

·      “Life insurance asks people who haven’t died to pay for people who have.”  (Not, I think,    what Jesus meant with the metaphor “Let the dead bury their dead.”

·      “Schools ask people who can read to help people who can’t.”

·      “Planes ask people who can fly them to fly people who can’t.”  (See also trains, buses, taxis, uber, lyft, etc.)

·      “Beaches and pools ask people who can swim to help people who can’t.”

·      “The Red Cross / FEMA, etc. ask people who aren’t in disaster areas to help people who are.”

And, of course, the whole system of government depends on taxation, which asks people who have money to give it, at least part of the time, to people who don’t, people who are educated to pay to educate those who aren’t yet educated, people who are housed to help people who aren’t, and so on and so forth.

            We’ve come a long way from “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country,” to “Don’t ask your country to do anything for you, especially if you actually need it.”

Sidenote: There’s a great moment in A Fish Called Wanda where Jamie Lee Curtis dismisses Kevin Kline’s claims to be an intellectual:  “Now let me correct you on a couple of things, OK? Aristotle was not Belgian. The central message of Buddhism is not "Every man for himself." And the London Underground is not a political movement. Those are all mistakes, Otto. I looked them up.”