American sports fans wearing redface to celebrate their favorite team isn't anything new. Unfortunately, at Thursday night's NFL game between the New York Giants and Washington's football team at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey, a Washington football fan appeared to do so once again -- along with a headdress and feathers.
First reported by The Huffington Post on Thursday night, the Washington fan's costume has since been covered by ESPN, the New York Daily News and TMZ.
While many were quick to decry the fan, others questioned what was so bad about the costume.
"So what?" is not only an ignorant reaction to seeing redface, but a harmful one as well. It's evident that many Americans don't think redface is offensive, even though Native American advocates and citizens agree it is.
"The reason why redface is harmful and so offensive is because it does dehumanize. It turns us into a caricature," Simon Moya-Smith told The Huffingont Post on Friday. Moya-Smith is a citizen of the Oglala Lakota nation and an editor at Indian Country Today, an online news magazine covering Native Americans.
Whether we're talking about the "Hollywood Indian," Rooney Mara playing Tiger Lily in the upcoming "Pan" movie or a sports fan in a headdress, Moya-Smith believes that American popular culture has conditioned us to be apathetic toward racist depictions of Native Americans.
"The fact that the dehumanization of Native Americans is so embedded in American culture that people hardly flinch, other than the Native American and the conscientious objector ... that’s the issue here. It’s not just this individual. It’s the culture that allows this," Moya-Smith continued.
American sports culture has also done its part to promote intolerance toward Native Americans, says James Peterson, director of Africana Studies at Lehigh University.
"Unfortunately, it is very, very difficult to teach young people and citizens of America that redface is offensive when you have an institution like that NFL or high schools or college sports that essentially promote redface ideology without any explanation or without any historical context," Peterson told HuffPost.
"What we have to be able to say to a person putting on redface and to the people who feel like it’s not a problem, is that it tucks in stereotypes that emerged out of oppressive colonial history, and for Native Americans, emerges out of the most comprehensively complete genocide," he continued.
Brian Howard, a legislative associate for the National Congress of American Indians, points toward the early 20th-century decline of the Native American population as one of the main causes for the rise and acceptance of Native American mascots, logos and names in sports.
"A lot of people believed that Native Americans were going to die away and become a part of history," Howard told HuffPost.
Lacking visibility outside of stereotypical depictions in white American culture, Native Americans and their 567 federally recognized tribes -- each with their o