Waubgeshig Rice remembers struggling with the Washington NFL team's name growing up. Now he's thankful his sons won't have to. ByDavidSingh discusses with the author and former broadcaster about the potential ripple effect of the name change.
SPORTSNET: When you see sports headlines and an Indigenous team name flashes across the screen, what goes through your head?Well, I find the blatant examples offensive. It disturbs me to see some slurs so freely thrown around like that and I often won’t click on the story or follow up on it because I don’t want to see those particular words repeated over and over in front of my eyes. So, I have tended to avoid coverage of some of those teams over the course of my sports fandom.
I think back to when I used to play fantasy football all the time and whenever the draft came up every year, I would specifically avoid drafting a Washington player, no matter how good they were. Because I didn’t want to have that sort of connection to my fantasy football team. And it’s obviously a very trivial thing and ultimately pretty meaningless. But even then, I didn’t want that regular reminder.
That’s the biggest question I think we’re facing right now. It is a hot topic of conversation. And fortunately, we have seen some meaningful change in recent months as a result of this more widespread awareness of issues of racism. But it remains to be seen. Hopefully we’ll still be talking about these things in three, six, 12 months’ time. But I take solace in the fact that there has been concrete change. The Washington team will no longer be known as that slur.
Oh, absolutely. Because I don’t see myself dropping out of sports fandom altogether — I will continue to watch sports. I really enjoy just sitting at home and watching the game. And my older son, who’s three and a half, is already well familiar with hockey. He knows I watch the Maple Leafs on a regular basis. So he’s aware of what these sports are and how I feel about them.
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