Washington Redfaced

There's nothing I like more than when the National Football League, which has done so much damage to our popular culture, is humiliated.  And no team deserves more humiliation than the Washington Redskins, for their racist name alone.

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has canceled the trademark on the Redskins name and logo for its disparaging reference to American Indians.  This means that anyone who wants to make money off the name and logo by putting them on football paraphernalia can do so without permission from the team.  Owner Daniel Snyder has vowed to appeal the ruling.  But if it holds, the team - which has been pressured to change its name for years - will likely have to give in to demands for a name change.

This isn't the first time this year that Snyder has been urged to change the team's name.  Recently, fifty U.S. Senators - 48 of 53 Democrats and both independents (note the absence of Senate Republicans, also known as the Washington Whiteskins) wrote to Snyder asking him to do so. Snyder and his minions responded by urging Redskins fans to go to Twitter and tweet U.S. Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid, one the letter's signatories, to "show your #RedskinsPride and tell him what the team means to you." The response to the #RedskinsPride hashtag led to bitter complaints about the name and jokes about the team's performance.

Ouch!

It won't be long before the name is changed, because the Redskins - appropriately enough, one of the most racist teams in the National Football League in the pre-civil rights era (then-owner George Preston Marshall had to be forced to integrate the team) - are going to have to face facts and get with the twenty-first century.  While such a name may have seemed innocuous in the 1950s, it clearly is offensive today. Snyder says he grew up as Redskins fan and wanted to own the Redskins, not the Red Hawks (the name for the varsity teams of Montclair State University in New Jersey, by the way), and so refuses to change the name.  But the name demeans a people humiliated by by oppression and victimized by genocide, something Snyder should appreciate (he's Jewish), and more and more folks are having a problem with that.

This wouldn't be the first Washington, D.C.-based major-league sports team to change its name. Several years ago, Abe Pollan, owner of the Washington Bullets basketball team, thought it was scarcely appropriate for his team to have such a name when kids in Washington's most impoverished neighborhoods were being killed by guns.  So, he held a contest among Bullets fans to choose a new name - "Wizards" was the winning entry, hence they are now the Washington Wizards.  A similar contest for the Redskins could foster goodwill and interest in the team.  It would also get fans' minds off their pathetic record. 

What name would I suggest?  How about the Washington Blockers - not after the blockers on a football team, but after congressional Republicans?  Or maybe the Washington Lobbyists, since, like many other NFL teams already have, they need a threatening name.  Maybe the Washington Supremes - not after Diana Ross's crew, but after the nation's highest court.  They could revive the Senators baseball team name for themselves, if they can get the rights to the name.  But not the Washington Diplomats, a name used by D.C.'s North American Soccer League team in the late seventies.  American football is anything but diplomatic.

Dan Snyder certainly isn't.