Mike Ditka isn’t one to be shy about his opinions, here is what he thinks of the Redskins name controversy via The Sporting News.
“This is so stupid it’s appalling,” Ditka, now an ESPN analyst, told the website redskinshistorian.com, “and I hope that owner keeps fighting for it and never changes it, because the Redskins are part of an American football history, and it should never be anything but the Washington Redskins. That’s the way it is.
“It’s been the name of the team since the beginning of football. It has nothing to do with something that happened lately, or something that somebody dreamed up. This was the name, period. Leave it alone. These people are silly — asinine, actually, in my opinion.”
“It was said out of reverence, out of pride to the American Indian. Even though it was called a Redskin, what are you going to call them, a Brownskin?”
The Brownskin comment probably went a tad bit too far. There are several names you could come up with that aren’t offensive to a section of the population. That is the main issue, just because Ditka and others don’t see the big deal, they can’t tell a Native American to just get over it and they should be proud about it. That is like a white person telling a black person to get over racism. That logic doesn’t compute.
With that being said, Ditka’s opinion is shared by many, but the controversy isn’t going away anytime soon.