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.