For years, the ticket resale industry has been trying to pull off one of the most ambitious rebrands in modern entertainment: convincing the public to stop calling them scalpers.

“Ticket reseller,” or “ticket broker” is now the preferred vernacular. Opponents of the word “scalper” argue term is outdated, unfair, and increasingly, offensive. Some brokers and advocates now claim the word itself carries racist connotations tied to violence against Native Americans and should be retired altogether.

At first glance, the argument sounds persuasive. America has spent the last decade reevaluating language once considered harmless but later understood to carry ugly historical baggage. Sports teams renamed themselves. Mascots disappeared. Corporate brands changed logos and slogans. Words matter more than they used to, or at least we are more willing to interrogate them.

And to be fair, the history of the word “scalp” is undeniably brutal.

During the colonial era and well into the American frontier period, scalping referred literally to the removal of a person’s scalp, often after battle or murder. Colonial governments and militias at various points established bounty systems that paid rewards for Native American scalps, turning human body parts into receipts for cash payments. Historians still debate the extent to which European settlers adopted or exaggerated the practice, but there is no debate that the term became deeply associated in American culture with barbarism, but attributed to and committed against indigenous people.

Which is why the modern argument surrounding “ticket scalping” initially feels plausible. If the root word evokes racialized violence, shouldn’t the modern business term be reconsidered too?

Sorry to break it to the resale industry, but the actual history of “ticket scalping” doesn’t really support that conclusion.