When President Donald Trump reopened a long-closed conversation about the name of the Washington NFL team, he and others implied that liberal thinking forced the venerable franchise to change its name from Redskins to Commanders in 2022.
It wasn’t “wokeness” that led to that moment. It was capitalism. Corporate sponsors made the decision, not politicians or fans.
On July 2, 2020, after the murder of George Floyd in late May and the resulting national conversation on race and racism, FedEx – the title sponsor of the team’s stadium at the time – called on the franchise to change its name.
Nike removed Redskins apparel from its website on the same day. The next day, the league and the organization announced that they were reviewing the team’s name. Soon, Amazon, Target and Walmart also removed Redskins merchandise from their stores and websites.
At a time of heightened corporate sensitivity to racism, the franchise suddenly saw the possibility of millions of dollars in revenue being lost due to the Redskins name. After years of controversy, the organization’s then-leadership finally saw the financial writing on the wall and gave up a fight they had promised to wage forever.
On July 13, the team announced it was retiring its name and logo and would go by the name Washington Football Team for the time being. Less than two years later, after a contest to rename the team, it became the Commanders.
None of this came about quickly, or without a fight. This was a conversation, and a decision, years in the making. Protests occasionally popped up around Washington Redskins games in the 1990s and early part of the 21st century, but there was no evidence of a groundswell to change the name.
In 2013, the National Congress of American Indians, representing 1.2 million people in its member tribes, announced that it opposed the moniker.
The team consistently replied by saying it was honoring the achievements of Native Americans by keeping the name. As evidence, then-team president Bruce Allen said that three high schools with a majority Native American student body used the name. The team and its supporters mentioned a 2004 poll by the Annenberg Public Policy Center that found that a majority of Native Americans were not offended by the name.
Then again, the use of public polling methods to measure a small, diverse population also came into question and was criticized by experts.
More than a decade ago, Sports Illustrated’s Peter King led the way, as did a few other sports journalists, including myself, publicly stating that we would no longer use the name – a name that each of us had said thousands of times in our careers covering the NFL.
“Try explaining and defending the nickname to a child,” I wrote in 2013. “It’s impossible.”
Back then, NFL commissioner Roger Goodell was still defending the team’s name, but he said in radio interviews that he wanted to “listen” on the issue.
“We’ll always listen, and we’ll always be open,” he said on ESPN Radio August 1, 2013, when asked to compare his defense of the Washington team name with his comments on Philadelphia Eagle Riley Cooper’s racist slur at the time, which were anything but a defense: “Obviously wrong … insensitive and unacceptable,” Goodell said of Cooper’s language.
Goodell went farther a month later while speaking to a Washington radio station: “Ultimately it is Dan (Snyder’s) decision, but it is something I want all of us to go out and make sure we are listening to our fans, listening to people that have a different view, and making sure we continue to do what is right. We want to make sure the team represents the strong tradition and history that it has for so many years. … If we are offending one person we need to be listening and making sure we are doing the right things to address that.”
As the battle reached a crescendo, a federal judge in Northern Virginia ordered the cancellation of the team’s federal trademark registrations in 2015 because the team’s name was viewed as “disparaging” to Native Americans. It was the team’s biggest legal and public relations loss to that point.
That decision came two years after then-owner Dan Snyder told USA Today sports reporter Erik Brady that he would “NEVER” change the Redskins’ name.
“We’ll never change the name. It’s that simple. NEVER — you can use caps.”
Seven years later, the name was gone.
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