‘Redskins’ is a racist, pejorative nickname based on a lie. Time for it to disappear | Opinion
The money is talking now. You can ignore logic and even turn a deaf ear to conscience, but when the money starts talking, you must listen.
The Washington Redskins’ nickname has no chance to survive what is happening.
It has long been an offensive, racist, pejorative anachronism beyond any real argument, but only now is it falling like a Confederate statue. No matter how much longer Redskins owner Dan Snyder pretends to dig in and defend the nickname, it does not have a chance.
Mammoth retailers including Amazon, Walmart, Target, Nike and Dick’s Sporting Goods have eliminated Redskins merchandise from their websites. Now FedEx — whose name is on the NFL club’s suburban Maryland stadium — officially requested a nickname change.
The franchise plans to build a new stadium and move within the D.C. city limits to better suit its first name, Washington, but officials there say it won’t if Redskins remains.
Snyder is being backed into a corner with no way out.
It seems only a matter of time before the commissioner Roger Goodell and the NFL itself demand the change, the new impetus for which is borne of the national attention to race relations, fairness and justice in the wake of the George Floyd killing.
The NFL has announced itself as woke by standing behind Black Lives Matter and (albeit four years late) supporting the Colin Kaepernick-led anthem kneeling representing a demand for social justice. Goodell must know that not entering the fray against the Redskins name is giving it tacit approval.
This week it is reported the Redskins will remove all Native American imagery from the franchise. That’s a start. Of course that start must end with a different nickname altogether. Now. Before the 2020 season starts (presuming the coronavirus/COVID-19 pandemic allows one).
Redtails, the choice of Washington quarterback Dwayne Haskins, is the betting favorite at 3-1 odds. Other possibilities at 10-1 or better: Generals, Presidents, Lincolns, Veterans, Capitols, Americans, Memorial, Monuments.
“Anything but Redskins” is the point.
The Cleveland Indians also are feeling heat, although that strikes us as simply descriptive, not pejorative, and could survive as long as offensive imagery is erased. (The Kansas City Chiefs and Atlanta Braves seem safe).
This is just more political correctness to some. On brand, Donald Trump has said so in defending Redskins.
But if you take the politics out of it, doesn’t political correctness become just correctness?
There will be an outcry from some tradition-bound Redskins fans.
Get over it. You will survive.
The Washington Bullets became the Wizards in 1997 because it dawned on them bullets didn’t feel quite right in a city that was then the murder capital of America. Times change.
The Tampa Bay Devil Rays dropped the Devils. Somehow, they were not smote to hell.
As for defiant traditionalist fans to whom the team will always be Redskins no matter what, your whole tradition is based on a fraud.
Beyond the fact many Native American groups hear the word redskins like a slur, the entire origin of the nickname is based on a lie.
The Boston Braves became the Boston Redskins in 1933 (and when they moved to Washington ‘37) because some Native American players disapproved of Braves, so, illogically then owner George Preston Marshall made it Redskins. Why? His reasoning was that he had hired a Native American head coach in Lone Star Dietz.
One problem there. William Henry “Lone Star” Dietz was later exposed in 2004 by Indian Country Today Media Network as a white man masquerading as a Native American.
And Marshall? The owner to blame for Redskins? A real piece of work, that dude.
Marshall was a certified, unrepentant racist. Because of a “gentleman’s agreement” he created, NFL teams did not sign a Black player until 1946, when two teams broke the agreement. Marshall held out until 1962, when Washington became the last team to integrate — and only then because U.S. Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall and Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy threatened to revoke the team’s 30-year stadium lease unless he did.
The George Preston Marshall Foundation served the interests of children in the D.C. area but stipulated that money must never go “to any purpose which supports the principle of racial integration in any form.” That was in place until the courts struck it down.
Unsurprisingly, last month, a statue of Marshall outside RFK Stadium was removed after it was vandalized amid the George Floyd protests. Also in June, Marshall’s name quietly was erased from the team’s Ring of Fame inside FedEx Field.
This is the odious man who was the father of the Redskins nickname.
One more reason enough to move on from it.
This story was originally published July 9, 2020 at 11:41 AM.
