Attention Daniel “NEVER” Snyder. (Brendan Smialowski/Getty Images)
Joining the likes of Washington City Paper, the Kansas City Star, and, well, us (among other publications), Slate magazine has decided to stop referring to the Washington football team’s racist name.
Though the issue of the Washington football team’s name has long been a source of contention among the local sports community and, while fans and journalists have been petitioning for a name change for decades, the pressure for owner Daniel Snyder to take action has been something of a hot-button topic in recent years. And for good reason.
Early this morning, Slate’s editor David Plotz published an impassioned, articulate, and particularly inspired article about why the site will no longer refer to the team by their given name. Apart from the obvious reason (that it’s simply a racial slur), he lists some recent reasons as to why they’re barring the name:
For decades, American Indian activists and others have been asking, urging, and haranguing the Washington Redskins to ditch their nickname, calling it a racist slur and an insult to Indians. They have collected historical and cultural examples of the use of redskin as a pejorative and twice sued to void the Redskins trademark, arguing that the name cannot be legally protected because it’s a slur. (A ruling on the second suit is expected soon; the first failed for technical reasons.) A group in the House of Representatives also recently introduced a bill to void the trademark. The team has been criticized from every different direction, by every kind of person. More than 20 years ago, Washington Post columnist Tony Kornheiser, no politically correct squish, urged the team to abandon the name. Today, the mayor of Washington, D.C.—the mayor!—goes out of his way to avoid saying the team’s name.
But of course, we know Snyder will never change name (or as he told USA Today recently: “We’ll never change the name. It’s that simple. NEVER—you can use caps.”) and a majority of fans are OK with that, apparently. But what makes Plotz’s case for changing the name is how the word has changed over time. Sure, when the team was founded in the 1930’s it was meant as an honorable name, but time has warped the meaning of the name and Plotz’s etymological argument hits the nail on the head:
Americans think differently about race and the language of race than we did 80 years ago. We now live in a world, for instance, in which it’s absolutely unacceptable for an NFL player to utter a racial slur. Changing the way we talk is not political correctness run amok. It reflects an admirable willingness to acknowledge others who once were barely visible to the dominant culture, and to recognize that something that may seem innocent to you may be painful to others.
Slate is owned by The Washington Post Company, whose flagship publication, The Washington Post, was just sold to Jeff Bezos. While Slate isn’t part of the deal, Plotz still hopes that their decision to drop the Washington Football Team’s name from their style guide might influence the Post to do the same, acknowledging that, while this is a big step for Slate, it’ll take pressure from a newspaper like the Post to really make Snyder reconsider:
Speaking as a Post subscriber, I wish they would change. The Post is—along with ESPN and the other NFL broadcasters—one of the only institutions that could bring genuine pressure on Snyder to drop the name. But it’s only fair to acknowledge that it’s a much more difficult decision for the newspaper than it is for us, given that covering Dan Snyder’s team is essential to the Post’s editorial mission.
