The Civil War
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| Marcus Mariota ready to receive the snap with Kenjon Barner lined up in an outside zone read formation in the 2012 Civil War. My Ducks win 48-24. // photo by osubeaver2000 |
The rivalry game between my beloved Oregon Ducks and the hated Oregon State Beavers, traditionally called the Civil War, will no longer officially be called the Civil War.
Now I'm not all that big on traditions. They can call it whatever the hell they want. But the reasoning behind all of this is all flabbergastingly off base.
The grievance is that it was named after the American Civil War and it has ties to slavery. While I never thought of the Civil War as specifically referencing the American Civil War, rather its generic usage as two warring sides within a state, there is at least a little credence to it being named after the specific historical event, though I think it's a bit tenuous.
But I don't really care about that. My real issue lies in Oregon State University president Ed Ray's explanation of the reasoning:
Changing this name is overdue as it represents a connection to a war fought to perpetuate slavery.
Did he say that the name should be changed because of a connection to a war fought to perpetuate slavery? Did he not realize that wars...have two (or more) sides to them? Did he not realize that one side, the side that Oregon fought in, fought to end slavery (to be precise, the war was started over secession, not slavery)? Did he not realize that's effectively what the American Civil War did...end slavery?
There are plenty of reasons to dislike the Civil War. It got hundreds of thousands of people killed. Hundreds of thousands were conscripted to fight in the war which is slavery by a different name. It destroyed the right to secession. Habeas corpus was suspended. Numerous war crimes were perpetrated by both sides. Nearly all other countries across the world were able to abolish slavery without a war.
The one good thing about the Civil War was related to slavery...how it eventually abolished slavery.
Ed Ray is no dummy. As much fun as it is for a Duck or Beaver to poke fun at the other side's educational bonafides, you don't become the president of a major university by being a dummy. But hot damn, that was a dumb statement.
In unofficial chatter, people talked about how racist Oregon's founding was, imagined to be a black-free state. Yes, and that was horrible. What does that have to do with the Civil War, other than the coincidence of the state being founded two years prior to the war? This points more to a reason to drop "Oregon" as a name, than "Civil War" as a name. People also talked about how "we should listen to black people". And I love Dennis Dixon, who apparently ignited this whole thing after receiving a call from some exec at Nike. But okay, well, Thomas Tyner and Tyson Coleman both are on record talking about how dumb the name change is. Do you listen to them too or are you just selective in which black people you listen to? Isn't that actually more racist, to assume that all black people have one opinion instead of treating them as individuals?
This is like removing all references to the Civil Rights Movement, citing that the fight in Congress concerning it was one fought to perpetuate segregation. Yeah, the reasoning is that stupid.
Or we can focus on real things, like educating people about the history of the Civil War (these are still places of higher education, are they not?), instead of wasting our time on name changes, that effectively do nothing, based on bizarre reasoning.
