Re-Defining A Slur

The owner of Washington's football team, short-fingered money grubber Dan "Li'l Danny" Snyder, is doing his cynical best to tamp down calls for a change in his team's racially offensive name.  He's set up a "foundation" to spread bribes hush money resources to Native American tribes, and hired some very toxic characters (e.g., Rethugs Frank Luntz and Ari Fleischer) to push a massive PR campaign to defend the team's name.

Part of the PR campaign is to deny the term "redskins" is offensive in any way, and Li'l Danny's leading the charge in revising the definition of the slur.  Here he was yesterday in an ESPN.com interview:

"A Redskin is a football player. A Redskin is our fans. The Washington Redskins fan base represents honor, represents respect, represents pride. Hopefully winning."

Not surprisingly,  Li'l Danny's defining the term not as it has been used pejoratively for over 100 years, and is defined in the dictionary, but strictly in reference to his football team and fans.   So here's the test that we know Li'l Danny won't take:  go to a convention or large gathering of Native Americans, and use the term "redskins" exclusively when addressing them as a group or individually, and see if they think you're "honoring" or "respecting" them.  Go ahead.

BONUS:  Once great Washington Post Bezos Bugle sports columnist Mike Wise had a column yesterday about an aspect of the team's "heritage and history" that Li'l Danny would like to gloss over:

In a Roanoke Times editorial last month, House Delegate David I. Ramadan (R-Loudoun) summed up his fellow Virginia officeholders’ passion for keeping the name: “It’s no mistake that members of this newfound caucus come from around the commonwealth. For generations, the [R-words] have been Virginia’s team, even the South’s team.” 

The South’s team. 

That’s precisely what George Preston Marshall called his faux-Indian franchise. It’s the same reason the original owner who named the team was the last to integrate his roster in 1962, 16 years after the NFL’s color barrier had been broken. And that came only after the Kennedy administration threatened to prohibit Marshall’s team from playing on federal land. 

This is the part of “Our shared heritage and history” that never made it into Snyder’s impassioned, keep-the-name letter last fall to fans. Beyond the Fun Bunch, Darrell Green, Art Monk and the rest, this is unavoidably also part of this franchise’s past. 

And the further south the owner and his team retreat — the more stubborn, bunker-down mentality takes over as proponents of changing the name grow — the more the symmetry grows with some of their Commonwealth neighbors.  (our emphasis)