Politically Correct: Washington Redskins Will Change Their Name After All

(Chaz Anon) Heavy pressure has been on Daniel Snyder, the owner of the Washington Redskin, and on Monday he will change his team’s name, mostly because of the insistence of Native American activist groups, and more recently corporate arm-twisting.

FedEx, the team’s naming rights partner whose CEO is part of the Redskins ownership group, had said it asked the Redskins to change their name. But Daniel Snyder considered it a “badge of honor” and referenced positive polling numbers for his reasons to keep the name.  

According to Charles Robinson of Yahoo! Sports, “a change is imminent and that the teams have been told to scrub the current team logo off of their platforms as a new name could be revealed in the next few days.”

A survey from 2019 found that Native Americans are more likely to be proud than offended by the name of the Washington Redskins.

The survey, as reported by the Washington Post, asked 500 people who identify as Native American to pick from a list of words which one best described their feelings about the Redskins name. The word most picked was “proud.”

Following “proud” came “indifferent,” “annoyed,” “content,” “satisfied” and “disappointed.”

The Washington Post did not publish the full results of the survey, so we do not know what percentage of respondents offered each response, but regarding the word “proud,” the Washington Post reports that “most of the survey’s respondents felt that way.”

These results echo those of a 2016 poll that found that only 9 percent of Native Americans described themselves as offended by the Redskins name, while 90 percent said it did not bother them.

The CNN angle goes like this:

"In light of the Black Lives Matter movement that has focused the world's attention on centuries of systemic racism, we are witnessing a fresh outpouring of opposition to the team name," the investors wrote. "Therefore, it is time for FedEx to meet the magnitude of this moment, to make their opposition to the racist team name clear, and to take tangible and meaningful steps to exert pressure on the team to cease using it."

So this is just another case of the neo-corporate state behemoth flexing it’s newly realized muscles.