The Washington Americans
There is a long history in this country of the appropriation and misapplication of the heritage of our indigenous people. Some of the most blatant is in sports. I personally don't find the Chiefs name or logo offensive, but being a Native American is not enough of my identity to feel like I'm an authority on the matter. I have mixed feelings about the Braves name. I appreciate that the University of Utah calls its sports teams the Utes and the University of Illinois calls its The Fighting Illini. The University of North Dakota went by The Fighting Sioux before they were petitioned to change their name, which is now the Fighting Hawks. The Florida State University sports teams call themselves the Seminoles after a regional tribe, which isn't inherently problematic (from my fifth-person perspective) but they do have a man dressed in red-face riding a horse as their mascot, and their war chant is some shit Hollywood invented in the time of black-and-white cowboy movies.
But this isn't about all those questionable names. This isn't even about the Cleveland Indians, whose insensitive logo was painted blonde on a parody T-shirt this summer. The Cleveland Caucasians T somehow offended some people who took to social media with no sense of irony. I mean, Caucasian is not an epithet. It's not entirely geographically applicable, but it's more accurate than calling the first peoples of the United States “Indians,” long after reconciling that they're not the folk from the valley of the Indus River.
No, this isn't about them, or the Chiefs, or the Braves, or the tribes that graciously lend their names to universities in lands stolen from them.
This is about the only sports team in the country whose given name is a racial slur. This is about the Washington Redskins. There are disputed reports of the etymology. NPR, for instance, cites “red men” being used to refer to the Beothuk people of what is now Newfoundland, before becoming a self-identifier. Esquire cites the Phips Proclamation of 1755 and nineteenth-century news articles calling for the murder and scalping of American Indians. The Washington Post published an article this year listing different historical usages from the eighteenth to the twenty-first century. While connotations vary greatly from self-identification to calls for large-scale assassination, one thing that cannot be disputed is that it is a term meant to identify a race. There are no other NFL teams to which this applies, save maybe the Vikings, whose name - like the Raiders and Buccanneers - comes from a pattern of actions rather than ethnic-identifying characteristics.
Besides the patently offensive name, the 'Skins, or the redacted's, as I've seen them called, or the Washington Racist-names, as I've taken to calling them, have a bit of a checkered history. They were the last squad in the NFL to integrate, doing so in 1962. That year, they selected Ernie Davis of Syracuse, the first ever black man to win the Heisman trophy. They immediately traded him to the Cleveland Browns for Floyd Little and Leroy Jackson, going from zero African-Americans to two in the space of one offseason. Despite that, they were the first team to win a Super Bowl with a black quarterback when Doug Williams – formerly of Grambling State University, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, and the USFL – finished the season replacing Jay Schroeder. Doug Williams wrote a book about his unfair treatment as the only starting black quarterback during his time in the NFL, so I won't detail that.
In recent years, the 'Skins have come under fire for their racist name. There was a big hubbub about it. They even lost their trademark, though owner Daniel Snyder refuses to take action. Why, if it was good enough for 1936, why not 2016? Somehow, some (white) people find it incredible that we find the name offensive. You know, if they were the Niggers or the Chinks or the Spics, that would be clearly offensive. And if they were the Blackskins or the Yellowskins or even the Whiteskins, that would all be offensive as well.
But I've come up with a solution that should please everyone. And I came up with this solution because the Washington Must-not-be-named's were playing someone and I found myself rooting for them. I like DeSean Jackson. I like Pierre Garcon. I even like Kirk Cousins, despite my misgivings about the circumstances under which he got his job. (Ie, the Washington football organization gracelessly divorced themselves from a Heisman-winning first round pick by the name of Robert Griffin III who dragged them to the playoffs in his rookie season.)
The Washington I'd-rather-not-say's don't have to change their colors; their location makes it obvious; and their logo goes from being inherently offensive to almost inherently uplifiting. Call them the WASHINGTON AMERICANS. They'd fit right in with the MLB team, the Nationals; and the NHL team, the Capitals.
It's like when Houston got a new team – after the Oilers became the Tennessee Titans – and they were trying to come up with something more Texan than a Cowboy. They became the Houston Texans. What's more American than the New England Patriots? The Washington Americans! The two squads even have some shared heritage. Back before the Patriots were founded in Boston, the Washington football team was the Boston Braves, named after the baseball squad that relocated to Atlanta, Georgia. Here's one more thing to unite you. Now we've got a cross-conference rivalry out of it.
Think of the money! Think of the merch you could sell! Every couple years, watching the Americans face off against the Cowboys on Thanksgiving Day. It sure seems less rhetorically objectionable than watching the Cowboys play the Racist-name-for-Amerindians. Think of the patriotism you could inspire. They could have red-white-and-blue alternates.
Everyone who's already a redacted fan could buy new jerseys. Everyone who was and then stopped because of the national controversy around the racist name (it's probably like five people) would be brought back into the fold. Plus the old jerseys would become vintage collectibles. And all we 'sensitive PC types' that Neanderthal football fans dislike so much would be appeased. It literally wouldn't be any kind of offensive. You would have taken the football team which represents the nation's capital and gone from calling them an epithet for Indigenous people to calling them the standard demonym for the United States. If it turns out thereafter that the logo is still seen as harmful, then perhaps we will have discovered that continued marginalization of our first peoples extends beyond how people are called into how they are treated. Maybe oppression goes beyond words into actions. Maybe changing this name is the very least we can do to work toward making the first Americans feel like they're not second-class citizens in their homeland.
