The historical overtones of “redskin” may be faint to most Americans, but they’re still audible whenever it’s said. Indians themselves sometimes use the word in team names as a reclaimed epithet, but that dispensation doesn’t extend to whites, no more than the appearance of the N-word in hip hop lyrics gives whites permission to use it it. If it’s a slur when you say it to an American Indian’s face, it’s a slur when you sing it with 80 thousand other fans. Of all the things that defenders the name have said, there’s nothing to touch the effrontery of Raskopf’s assertion “This is our word”—as if the team had the power to pluck the word out of history, both theirs and its own, and oblige everyone, Indians included, to honor their meaning of the word.

I understand why fans get irritated when someone suggests that there’s anything racist in Indian team names and the spectacle and behavior that they give rise to. The tomahawk chop, the war bonnets and war drums, the chants—it’s just people having fun, in the great American tradition of playing Indian. Since the time of the Boston Tea Party, after all, “acting like a wild Indian” has been the characteristic expression of the unbridled American id.

But everything changes when you come to realize that Redskins is genuinely offensive to some. A lot of fans react by getting defensive, decrying the whining oversensitivity of the complainers, railing about PC and the thought police. At that point, though, the game is already up. Once that testy or belligerent note creeps into the chants and songs, they can’t be innocent fun anymore. Best give it up, so the conversation can return to football.