Category Archives: redskins

Taunting Penalty?

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There is no refuge from Trump’s bullying and grandstanding. Even in the sports section. Trump’s defiant, ruthless exertion of power in all matters, his self-serving flexing of immunity muscles granted by the Supreme Court and his insistence on umpiring cultural standards, now has metastasized into his ordering the NFL’s Washington Commanders to revert to their former nickname—Redskins—a dictionary-defined slur against Native Americans that was retired five years ago.

It is another stop on the Current Occupant’s revenge tour against all who have offended him—this one a payback for the decades of rejection of entry into the exclusive NFL club in his failed bids for team ownership. This getting-even inclination is so constant that the satiric Borowitz Report recently envisioned Trump offering to “end his war with Harvard University if it admits him to its freshman class.”

“Harvard blew their chance to admit Donald J. Trump in 1964,” in Andy Borowitz’s mock telling of a Trump social media post, “and now they can fix that. Or else.”

Now Trump has actually threatened to rechristen the Washington team “Redskins.” Or else he will scuttle the team’s plans for a new stadium in D.C.

This is one more instance, too, of Trump’s twisted application of civil rights. Restoring the team’s old name, he said, wouldn’t disparage Indigenous Americans but somehow preserve their “heritage and prestige.” Because “massive numbers” of Native Americans want the name switched back, he claimed—though there is overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

According to Reuters, “These mascots and names do not honor Native Peoples,” the Association on American Indian Affairs said in a statement. “They reduce us to caricatures. Our diverse Peoples and cultures are not relics of the past or mascots for entertainment. Native Nations are sovereign, contemporary cultures who deserve respect and self-determination, not misrepresentation.”

But this is a perfect example of Trump’s supercilious convictions, his need to butt into everyone’s business for no other reason than feeding his Brobdingnagian ego and getting his way. Here he is, one of the world’s most powerful political figures, again barging into inconsequential matters.

Was it really his influence, as the White House claimed, that finally got star Colorado quarterback Shedeur Sanders selected in the sixth round of this year’s NFL draft—five rounds later than widely predicted? Was the late Pete Rose, long ago found guilty of violating the baseball cardinal sin of gambling on the game, made eligible for the Hall of Fame because Trump threw his weight around? Twinning with his Commanders-to-Redskins demand is a similar insistence of insensitivity—that Cleveland’s baseball team, now the Guardians, also insult Native Americans by reverting to calling themselves the Indians.

It should be noted that, in 2013, according to Politico, when then-President Barack Obama joined a growing chorus to drop Washington’s racist nickname, a reality TV personality named Donald Trump tweeted, “President should not be telling the Washington Redskins to change their name—our country has far bigger problems! FOCUS on them, not nonsense.”

Now among Trump’s meddling in affairs outside his purview are his noises about fixing the chaos of college sports’ name/image/likeness guidelines. (While wars rage in Ukraine and Gaza and America’s traditional European allies make plans to exist without a U.S. partner, and global markets grasp for some sense of order among threatened American tariffs. Not to mention the fuss over Trump’s past associations with the sex-trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. Bigger problems indeed.)

Shortly before Trump’s current railing about the Commanders’ nickname, he directed the same sort of counterintuitive argument via U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon, that a New York state mandate forcing a high school on Long Island to discard its demeaning Indian mascot somehow would “silence the voices of Native Americans, and discriminatorily choose which history is acceptable to promote or erase.” Native American groups have argued just the opposite for half a century.

Forty years ago, Trump—then an attention-hog real estate developer—bought the New Jersey franchise in the one-year-old USFL spring league, angling to force a merger with (and his personal entry into) the NFL. Two seasons later, the USFL’s demise was sealed by Trump’s insistence it move to the fall and go head-to-head with the NFL.

During the USFL’s suit against the NFL, which the USFL won but was awarded just $1 in damages (tripled to because it was an antitrust case), Trump repeatedly was cited for lying in his testimony. One whopper was that then-NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle had offered Trump an NFL team in exchange for keeping the USFL season in the spring, which Rozelle denied. Six days after the trial, the USFL folded. (My own interview with Trump shortly after he had purchased the USFL’s New Jersey team also rendered a handful of his—um—inaccuracies, easily exposed with a little follow-up reporting.)

Over the next several years, NFL owners denied Trump bids to buy the then-Baltimore Colts, the Dallas Cowboys, the New England Patriots and the Buffalo Bills. In 2014, the Washington Post reported that Trump had been effectively “blackballed” from NFL team ownership. In 2016, when San Francisco quarterback Colin Kaepernick precipitated a players’ protest of racial injustice and police brutality by kneeling during the national anthem, Trump—amid his ongoing feud with the league and disdain for minorities—called for firing those players.

Just another grievance. Another prejudice. There’s no escaping it.

Re-name that team

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For a new name, I suggest “Washington Pigskins.” That would check all the boxes: 1) History, by retaining a reference to the ‘Skins moniker that has been part of the NFL team’s identity since 1933. 2) The sport in question, since footballs, though never made from a pig’s skin, nevertheless have been stuck with the description for more than a century. 3) Washington fans’ particular fondness for members of the massive offensive line, known as the Hogs, that produced three Super Bowl titles in the 1980s and ‘90s. 4) and most important, it’s a handle that wouldn’t insult anyone.

Sports nicknames range from the geographically (Colorado Rockies) or historically (Philadelphia 76ers) appropriate to simple alliteration (Baylor Bears) and wieldiness (Minnesota Wild). They aren’t of great import and occasionally are downright wacky. A minor-league hockey team in Georgia was the Macon Whoopies. There was a high school in Illinois called the Polo Marcos. The UC Santa Cruz teams are known as the Banana Slugs.

But there is this obtuse old habit of pro, college and high school teams calling themselves Indians, Braves, Chiefs and so on—and employing wild-eyed, bloodthirsty-looking caricatures, feather-wearing fans and “war” chants as part of their act. At least since the early 1970s, indigenous peoples have been raising public objections. Please stop, Native American leaders said: “We’re people, not mascots.”

Some teams did stop, decades ago. Dartmouth College ditched “Indians” for “Big Green.” Stanford University replaced “Indians” with “Cardinal.” St. John’s University transitioned from “Redmen” to “Red Storm.” Just to cite a few. Yet the highest-profile of the offenders, the professional football team in the nation’s capital, has persistently used—and repeatedly defended—a racial slur as its brand for 87 years. The Washington Redskins.

Retired Washington Post reporter Leonard Shapiro this week recalled confronting then-team owner Jack Kent Cook in 1992 with Webster’s unabridged dictionary’s derogatory definition of the nickname. That was when activists attempted (but failed) to remove trademark rights to the name.

“I don’t care what Webster’s says,” Shapiro quoted Cook. “I use the Oxford Dictionary, and my dear boy, it says no such thing.”

In the same lordly fashion of Cook and George Preston Marshall—the avowed racist who founded the team, burdened it with the “Redskins” name and was the last NFL owner to integrate his roster—current owner Daniel Snyder has continued to belligerently resist demands to show a little respect.

In 2013, during yet another round of protests by Native American groups and an increasingly mainstream awareness of the disparaging term, Snyder swore “never” to change it. At the time, D.C. mayor Vincent Gray refused to utter the nickname, referring only to “our Washington team.” Sports Illustrated football maven Peter King and my former Newsday colleague Tom Rock did the same. A D.C. high school announced that it was barring all Washington team paraphernalia on its campus.

(On that occasion, the satirical “news” site, The Onion, acknowledged Snyder’s willfully tone-deaf stubbornness by recommending he change the name to “the D.C. Redskins.” Another snarky source proposed that, if he was so intent of keeping “Redskins,” Snyder could at least show a touch of sensitivity by tweaking the logo to a redskin potato.)

True to form, Snyder—backed by NFL commissioner Roger Goodell at the time—cited polls claiming that Native Americans weren’t put off by the name, and took refuge in the weak excuse that he was preserving the team’s sacred tradition and heritage.

That struck Duke University cultural anthropologist Orin Starn, who was teaching a Native American studies program, as a “spurious argument. You don’t want to keep the tradition of separate drinking fountains for blacks and whites or the tradition of keeping black players out of professional sports [as Marshall had].”

Except, of course: “Rich men don’t like to be told what to do,” Starn said.

So here’s what appears to be different now amid the nationwide demonstrations over minority human rights and social justice following George Floyd’s murder by a Minnesota policeman. The corporate giants FedEx and Nike, speaking Snyder’s language—big money—have sensed a different answer blowing in the wind and have let Snyder know it.

Snyder suddenly is saying the team is open to a “thorough review” of the nickname, and already alternatives are being offered on social media: The Washington Redtails—a nod to the nickname for the crimson-tailed planes flown by World War II’s Tuskegee Airmen, America’s first Black military aviators in World War II. The Washington Americans. Generals. Presidents. Lincolns. Memorials. Veterans. Jeffersons. Roosevelts. Monuments.

Snyder could take his pick. Or, he could keep his willfully degrading team name. And retain his personal appellation: the Washington Pigheaded.