[T]here is a still a National Football League franchise named the Washington Redskins. The owner of this team, a priceless asshole named Dan Snyder, has lawyered and P.R.’d up in the past year to weather the growing pressure for him to just change his team’s name to something else — something Snyder will “never” do, because it’s just that important to him for his team to continue being named the Redskins.
I don’t know what it is about the Washington Redskins that seems to condemn one of the NFL’s premier franchises to being owned by unapologetic racists. The team was founded by George Preston Marshall, who until 1961 refused to draft African-American players…despite the fact that the Redskins had for years been doormats. It took the pressure from the Kennedy Administration (the team played in a stadium built on federal land) to get the Redskins to break the barrier and draft an African-American player. One might have thought that the years of football futility, largely due to Marshall’s white-players-only rule, would have swayed the balance, but he was more concerned with the bottom line and not alienating what he felt to be the team’s core fan base.
Marshall’s will stipulated that his money not go to groups that practiced religious discrimination nor to groups that advocated for racial integration. Yes, you read that correctly; Marshall had no problem with racial discrimination…but religious discrimination was beyond the pale. We’re not talking about a Nobel Peace Prize candidate here, though Marshall was quite happy to regale anyone who would listen with his record of hiring minorities for menial positions. The man could spin his decades-long record of unreconstructed racism from dross into pure gold, but even he finally had to admit that the forces of history weren’t on his side. In 1961, the Redskins drafted Ernie Davis (who died of cancer without playing a down in the NFL) and traded him to Cleveland for Bobby Mitchell, an African-American All-Pro flanker.
In the intervening 50+ years, Washington- home to arguably the most passionate fan base in the NFL- has enjoyed a modicum of success, and they’ve become much like any other franchise chasing a Super Bowl championship. Their roster, like all other teams- is dominated by African-Americans. That should hardly be taken as proof that racism and Washington’s NFL team aren’t still tightly intertwined. There’s still the issue of the team’s nickname, which despite all efforts to rationalize and defend it over the years, remains a symbol of racism and disrespect to Native Americans.
In fact, the current owner has taken the racism and the venality up a notch by buying off the opposition and creating propaganda designed to justify retaining the Redskins nickname.
Daniel Snyder has long said that he would never change the name of his team. The reality that his team’s nickname is a clear and undeniable racial slur that’s been decried and protested by much of the Native American community for decades seems not to matter. Rather than admit to the truth, Snyder has poured thousands of dollars into trying to buy off Native Americans, a handful of whom, in exchange for their forty pieces of silver, agreed to speak up in support of the nickname.
As NFL training camps began a few weeks ago, so did the P.R. effort by Redskins executives to defend the name. A new website called Redskins Facts is up and being advertised heavily across the Web. “The group’s Web site,” the Washington Post reported, ” lists a five-man steering committee of former players — Gary Clark, Chris Cooley, Mark Moseley, Ray Schoenke and Roy Jefferson.” Three of those players “traveled to the Rocky Boy’s Reservation in Montana…meeting with Chippewa-Cree tribal leaders and visiting a football practice and a rodeo session, which was sponsored by the team’s Original Americans Foundation.” The reservation has received an “influx” of money from the Original Americans Foundation (again, for some reason not named the Redskins Foundation), including “150 iPads for the schools on the reservation,” sponsorship of a “33-member rodeo team that travels the country to compete, and a playground.
That’s Snyder’s PR and propaganda efforts are as despicable as they are deceptive is difficult to miss. He could get out in front of the issue, announce that he realizes the time has come to find a less racially-charged nickname for his team, and come out looking like a hero. It would be a fantastic opportunity to gain priceless PR, press attention, and good will. Snyder could show the sports world that he gets it, and in so doing create a situation in which he could make millions. The marketing and licensing potential alone would seem virtually limitless.
He could do that…but what he’s decided to do instead is dig his heels in and stand behind a nickname redolent of racism and disrespect. Redskins Facts and the Original Americans Foundations are thinly veiled attempts to buy off opponents so that he can “prove” his team’s nickname to be neither offensive nor racist.
It could well be that Snyder is arrogant enough to think that he can throw money at this issue and it will simply disappear. If it’s true that a fool and his money are sooner parted, Snyder should watch his wallet…because I have a feeling this issue isn’t going away. It may not be long before the decision is taken out of his hands, though the idea of NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell doing the right thing anytime soon seems laughable.
