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EDITORIAL: Now is the right time for the Redskins to change the team’s name

3 min read
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The Washington Redskins had an abysmal 3-13 record last season and haven’t won a Super Bowl in close to 30 years, but the team surely still has devout fans who will be in the stands come hell or high water, even if they go 1-15.

And many of those fans have probably never given a second thought to the team’s name, harbor no prejudicial thoughts toward Native Americans and have cheered on the Redskins because it’s the football team closest to them, the same way Pittsburghers have rooted for the Steelers.

The same goes for the Cleveland Indians, the Atlanta Braves, the Kansas City Chiefs, the Chicago Blackhawks, and on and on. The names go back years, in some cases more than a century, and are packed with history, tradition and sentiment.

Still, it’s probably time for those names to be consigned to history.

To be sure, at a moment when many Americans are frightened about spiking COVID-19 numbers, are worried about their livelihoods, and increasingly at each other’s throats over mask-wearing and whether schools should resume in-person instruction in the weeks ahead, the moral and ethical implications of the names of professional sports teams should, in all reality, be low on the list of concerns. But we are also at an undeniable crossroads. America is coming to terms with its long history of racial injustice following the killing of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police officers almost two months ago. And that reckoning has stretched beyond the Black community to include other minority groups, such as Native Americans. There actually isn’t a more opportune time to reconsider the monikers of professional sports teams.

After years of controversy, Redskins’ owner Dan Snyder announced days ago that the team’s name and logo would at long last be retired and replaced by a name yet to be determined. It’s likely that dollars-and-cents had something to do with Snyder’s decision; FedEx, whose name is affixed to the stadium where the Redskins play in Maryland, said it wanted the name changed, as did other corporate heavy-hitters like Pepsi and Nike. The change is happening despite the fact that Snyder once vowed that it never would.

After the decision was announced, The Washington Post reposted a column to its website by the late Charles Krauthammer that eloquently laid out the reasons why the Redskins’ name needed to be changed. Written in 2013, Krauthammer pointed out that “words don’t stand still. They evolve.”

Keep in mind that Krauthammer was a conservative who had no truck with what he called “the language police” who work to wipe everyday discourse clean of anything that might give offense. Krauthammer said his objections to the Redskins’ name was rooted in “simple decency,” not in “public polls or public scolds.”

“I wouldn’t want to use a word that defines a people, living or dead, offended or not, in a most demeaning way,” he wrote. “It’s a question not of who or how many had their feelings hurt, but of whether you want to associate yourself with a word that, for whatever historical reason having nothing to do with you, carries inherently derogatory connotations.”

Krauthammer died in 2018. It’s a pity he didn’t live to offer his take on this moment.

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