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Comment by kaitai | Hacker News Reader

Changing sports team names does reduce the number of people prancing around in fake headdresses and doing the "Tomahawk chop"...

I would love to spend more time on economic and tax code reform so as to make the United States more equitable. Would you like to join me? There is not a lot of benefit in arguing, "This is not the thing I think is most important for you to do, so you shouldn't do it" -- let people work on what they want to work on, and put your energy into making substantive change that you believe in.

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i'm with you. it's shocking how much attention this bullshit is getting, while there are a million more imortant issues to tackle. this is misdirection at its worst.

The parent post is saying that it's pointless to call this bullshit and complain about what other people are upset about. It's also saying that changing team names reduces racism as it stops people from performing racist actions that have been built into showing team support.

It's not misdirection. It's just that these are issues you personally don't care about.

the misdirection isn't the name change itself, which is trivial in every sense of the word, it's the bullshit discussion around it. to continue focusing on it after the fact is the misdirection, keeping us from discussing substantive issues, like actual systemic, structural barriers to prosperity and equality of opportunity.

What makes the discussion bullshit? It's a hurtful name. It's good for society to recognize and discuss that.

names don't hurt. how we respond is what can hurt, how we allow words to infect us. but we have brains that can rationalize that away, make us defiant and resilient against it. we're literally talking about the trivialities of 5 year olds when we talk so incessantly about names.

what really hurts is, for instance, decades of redlining and systemic bias in politics, economics, education, nutrition, medicine, and a myriad of other daily, real issues that affect the lives of millions of americans, and billions of people worldwide.

this discussion is bullshit because we are not talking about those things. it's a misdirection.

Plenty of people are talking about those things. It's not either or.

Names do hurt. Does blackface hurt? That's essentially what having a team called the Redskins is. It's important to talk about how mass media and the mainstream will accept openly racist symbols. In the case of Native Americans it's also important to talk about how they went through a barely recognized genocide and have been systematically discriminated against in a major way.

It's important to learn about it, but being completely obsessed about the issue and view everything from its perspective is counter-productive. It's really an American thing, because many European nations went through similar experiences multiple times.

> It's really an American thing, because many European nations went through similar experiences multiple times.

It’s not even legal to talk about Nazis in Germany. Imagine the uproar if a sports team was named after a caricature of Jewish people?

People just want some basic dignity. The only people “obsessed” are those refusing to give it to them.

"racist actions" but a vast VAST majority of Indians don't find it racist.

When everything is racist? nothing is.

That's the key problem with all of these diatribe's. Anything you disagree with is "racist actions" and thus real racist actions are lost in the sea of BS about team names and Aunt Jemima syrup.

That’s not true at all. It’s widely accepted these things are racist. I already posted the support for the name change by many Native communities.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Washington_Redskins_...

Part of the point is to create jobs for political apparatchiks. We've trained tons of witches with degrees in whateverstudies and not much else to show for it. Ever wonder why they set up political DIE commissar's offices and demand people to get training? It's to parasitize actually productive things.

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