Native Americans mascot and nickname controversy has been going on since 1960s. Even though there is the existence of campaigns which oppose the use of Native Americans mascot and nickname, some teams still use it. There are many people who support the term “Redskins” used by Washington Redskins, though U.S. Patent and Trademark Office cancel this team trademark because they think this term is offensive. This research is conducted in the purpose to find out how color-blind racism exists in this case. The result of the research is used to find out the practice of color-blind racisms in the Washington Redskins mascot and nickname controversy.
This qualitative research is conducted under the scope of American Studies which especially focuses on ethnic studies and media studies. This research source of data uses online news articles from Sport Illustrated (http://www.si.com), National Public Radio (http://www.npr.org), Washington Post (http://www.washingtonpost.com), and MRCTV‘s channel on YouTube which are published in 2014. In this case, Eduardo Bonilla-Silva’s color-blind racism theory is applied to analyze the online news articles indicated by the practice of color-blind racism towards Native Americans. Rhetorical analysis is also applied to analyze the words, phrases, clauses, and sentences mentioned in the online news articles.
There are four central frames of color-blind racism that are shown in analysis. The four central frames of color-blind racism; abstract liberalism, naturalization, cultural racism, and minimization of racism are practiced by the supporters of Washington Redskins’ mascot and nickname as they give their statement in the online news articles. The analysis also shows how ‘honor’ often used by the supporters shows that they are already used to the term ‘Redskins’ because media preference reinforces the stereotypical Native Americans in mainstream media.