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Redskins Name Change Thread

Exactly. Silent Sam was the OG Tar Heel. UNC was racist as hell during this time (see Silent Sam, Kenans, etc). You can't believe the selection of the name was harmless. Time for a progressive institution to be honest with itself and set an example instead of conveniently recasting history.
 
birdman said:
No, the name predates the civil war. It comes from Eastern NC being a producer of tar and turpentine derived from Longleaf Pine sap. NC was an important world wide supplier of pine sap tar for sealing wooden ships and turpentine was medicinal before antibiotics. The laborers would get sap on their feet that was impossible to clean off. Civil war soldiers adopted the name as a point of pride to be from NC, but the name actually predates the civil war by a long time.

Wikipedia
“The origins of the Tar Heel nickname trace back to North Carolina's prominence in the mid 18th and 19th centuries as a producer of turpentine, tar, pitch, and other materials from the state's plentiful pine trees.[1] "Tar Heel" (and a related version, "Rosin Heel") was often applied to the poor white laborers who worked to produce tar, pitch, and turpentine. The nickname was embraced by North Carolina soldiers during the Civil War and grew in popularity as a nickname for the state and its citizens following the war.”

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tar_Heel
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Seems like a revisionist history pitched to replace the Civil War origin. Click the source link [1]. This is what it says.

https://www.ncpedia.org/naval-stores

“The phrase "Tar Heel," the nickname for North Carolinians and the state itself, possibly originated from the fact that people working around turpentine stills often got tar on the soles of their shoes, allegedly helping them "stick" to their assigned jobs.”

No evidence of the term being used in a newspaper or other publication before the Civil War.

And that’s after the link admits enslaved people were important in the production.

So either it’s a reference to enslaved people stuck to their jobs or Confederate soldiers.
 
PhDeac said:
Seems like a revisionist history pitched to replace the Civil War origin. Click the source link [1]. This is what it says.

https://www.ncpedia.org/naval-stores

“The phrase "Tar Heel," the nickname for North Carolinians and the state itself, possibly originated from the fact that people working around turpentine stills often got tar on the soles of their shoes, allegedly helping them "stick" to their assigned jobs.”

No evidence of the term being used in a newspaper or other publication before the Civil War.

And that’s after the link admits enslaved people were important in the production.

So either it’s a reference to enslaved people stuck to their jobs or Confederate soldiers.
Click to expand...

There is no denying that the entire history of North Carolina is tied up in Slavery and it played a big role in the confederacy. However, the origin of the name Tar-Heel is not confederate soldiers but rather turpentine, tar and pitch production form long leaf pine sap in Eastern NC. Saying that the name has it's roots in the Confederacy is revisionist. In truth it was probably a derogatory name that rich merchants used to describe the poor ass people or slaves working to produce the stuff that made them rich, which those rich merchants then used to convince North Carolinians to have state pride and join a war effort that directly undermined their own economic interests.

Anyway, if the name evokes the Confederacy for people, even if that is not the true origin, they should probably consider changing it. I still think the true origin of the name matters though. I grew up a St. John's Redmen fan. They got the nick name 110 years ago from the fact that their uniforms were red, just like the Syracuse Orangemen got their name from wearing orange uniforms. But native Americans became offended when people started associating the name with native tribes and wearing "Indian chief headdresses" to games. So the university changed the name to the red storm. I think it was the right thing to do, but St. Johns has sucked really badly ever since the name change in the mid 90's so a small part of me wishes they had worked a little harder to obviate the origin of the name and forbid the offensive costumes at games instead.
 
birdman said:
There is no denying that the entire history of North Carolina is tied up in Slavery and it played a big role in the confederacy. However, the origin of the name Tar-Heel is not confederate soldiers but rather turpentine, tar and pitch production form long leaf pine sap in Eastern NC. Saying that the name has it's roots in the Confederacy is revisionist. In truth it was probably a derogatory name that rich merchants used to describe the poor ass people or slaves working to produce the stuff that made them rich, which those rich merchants then used to convince North Carolinians to have state pride and join a war effort that directly undermined their own economic interests.

Anyway, if the name evokes the Confederacy for people, even if that is not the true origin, they should probably consider changing it. I still think the true origin of the name matters though. I grew up a St. John's Redmen fan. They got the nick name 110 years ago from the fact that their uniforms were red, just like the Syracuse Orangemen got their name from wearing orange uniforms. But native Americans became offended when people started associating the name with native tribes and wearing "Indian chief headdresses" to games. So the university changed the name to the red storm. I think it was the right thing to do, but St. Johns has sucked really badly ever since the name change in the mid 90's so a small part of me wishes they had worked a little harder to obviate the origin of the name and forbid the offensive costumes at games instead.
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I'm OK with UNC sucking so they should absolutely change the name.
 
just looking around the internet about the term tarheel and I found this...never heard this one before and good gracious our ancestors sure were obsessed with being racists.

"The University of North Carolina football team changed its name from the White Phantoms to the Tar Heels in the 1920s,"
 
"In truth it was probably a derogatory name that rich merchants used to describe the poor ass people or slaves working to produce the stuff that made them rich, which those rich merchants then used to convince North Carolinians to have state pride and join a war effort that directly undermined their own economic interests."

That's not really much better. "It's not a name given to Confederate soldiers. It's a name used to mock enslaved people and poor white people that was redeemed by Confederate soldiers."
 
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Can't wait for the first book burning......away with this horrible history. Did the Holocaust really happen?
 
Dutch Deacon 65 said:
Can't wait for the first book burning......away with this horrible history. Did the Holocaust really happen?
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It's not "doing away with history." It is picking and choosing who and what in history is memorialized, celebrated and aggrandized with monuments, statues, named buildings etc. Nuance and context are difficult to impossible in such things.

Nuance and context and description are much more easily and properly done in history books. That is where the stories of Confederate leaders belong. Not as statues on street corners and in.parks.
 
PhDeac said:
"In truth it was probably a derogatory name that rich merchants used to describe the poor ass people or slaves working to produce the stuff that made them rich, which those rich merchants then used to convince North Carolinians to have state pride and join a war effort that directly undermined their own economic interests."

That's not really much better. "It's not a name given to Confederate soldiers. It's a name used to mock enslaved people and poor white people that was redeemed by Confederate soldiers."
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I just want to be clear that I am not defending the name. I just like the long leaf pine story. Long Leafs are the Bison of the South eastern tree world, or The passenger pigeon of the tree world. It was once among the most numerous trees in the world but now it it reduced to ~4% of its historic range. The economy of the great state of North Carolina was established because of the amazing tree and now the only substantial tracks left in the state are on Fort Brag...named after a confederate general. Anyway the story of Long Leafs is tragic.
 
Deaconblue said:
It's not "doing away with history." It is picking and choosing who and what in history is memorialized, celebrated and aggrandized with monuments, statues, named buildings etc. Nuance and context are difficult to impossible in such things.

Nuance and context and description are much more easily and properly done in history books. That is where the stories of Confederate leaders belong. Not as statues on street corners and in.parks.
Click to expand...
....That's true, but totally removing them from parks or street corners removes an important historical link to the past. Not many people read history books so a statue (might) be their only knowledge of past events. In these cases we are dealing with emotions much like the black student at UNC who felt safer when the Silent Sam statue had been removed.
 
The statues were put up to support the goals of the Confederacy including white supremacy and intimidate Black people.

The statues were taken down to show that we shouldn’t honor the Confederacy. The removal of statues is history in itself.
 
We need to shut down the University of North Carolina and sell it off part by part, starting with the basketball team.
 
Why wouldn’t a big corporation just by the team name? With merchandise, that’s way better exposure than being mentioned with a stadium name. They mention the stadium once or twice per game broadcast. You see the corporate logo on every play on a jersey.
On the flip side, you don’t want your brand to be a doormat. At least stadiums can feel more linked to the community than the team.
 
Yeah. Nobody wants their brand name controlled by Daniel Snyder's front office moves and Ron Rivera's coaching.
 
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