Sometimes, you look at an article twice just to make sure it’s not from The Onion. That was certainly the case when I read
last Friday’s Washington Post, which featured an op-ed from
Simon Waxman demanding the U.S. military drop the references to Native Americans from its helicopter names.
This of course comes in the wake of the recent controversy surrounding the Washington Redskins.
But Waxman, the managing editor of
Boston Review, created a false equivalence between a football team named after a term generally considered to be a racial slur—“redskin”—and products named after the proper names for Native American tribes—Apache, Kiowa, etc.
A quick tip for op-ed writers. For something to be offensive, people generally need to be, well, offended in the first place.
Yet notably absent from Waxman’s missive are any quotes from irate Native American leaders—a particularly glaring omission.
