“We’ll never change the name,” billionaire Redskins team owner Dan Snyder said in 2013. “It’s that simple. NEVER — you can use caps.” Snyder reneged on that promise when the Redskins nickname was “retired” amid the upheavals of the summer of 2020. He then ratified his dishonesty when, after two entire NFL seasons of flailing for a new name, he replaced the now-unsayable appellation the franchise had worn from 1933 until deep into the 21st century with a placeholder: the Washington Football Team.
As of a characteristically botched rollout this past February, the Team will instead be called the Commanders. With their nickname and fight song gone, all that remains of the former Redskins is a burgundy-and-gold color pattern — although, in yet another disturbing rupture with the past, the Commanders also unveiled atrocious black alternate jerseys, a color the Washington franchise has never worn before.
Snyder got what he really wanted all along, though. When the ‘ders take the field this coming fall, they’re likely to extend a once-unthinkable 29-year streak of sub-11-win seasons. But at least these losers are playing at a stadium for which FedEx continues to pay the naming rights, and at least Nike will still be selling and producing Washington football gear. Snyder gutted the most beloved — some would say only — civic institution in the nation’s capital in order to satisfy various post-George Floyd ultimata from the team’s corporate partners. To the Commanders’ owner and much of the national elite, there’s almost no tradition or symbol or source of shared meaning that can’t be jettisoned if there’s money and prestige or even just personal convenience at stake.
It would be ridiculous to argue that the Redskins name change did anything other than make America and the world a worse place. But revealingly, I know of no one who’s ever tried to argue for why the name should never have been changed.
The Redskins name change starkly exposes the Baptists-and-bootleggers coalition that is reshaping American life. On one side are activists and their collaborators in politics, the media, the corporate world, and the law profession who claim to want to cleanse society of anything that falls within their own ever-evolving definition of racism. Their unlikely partners are hyperwealthy business figures who have their net worth tied up in such morally upstanding enterprises as … gladiatorial combat between young men recruited from the country’s social and geographic periphery.
What has emerged is a situation in which someone like Snyder can operate in a world of symbolic, pretend morality, meaning he can now happily meet activist demands in exchange for being able to continue to hold a lucrative license to despoil society rather than providing something of actual value. The Redskins name change is a case in point. Few have argued that swapping a depiction of a Native American for branding that celebrates the military that warred against them has done anything to alleviate the national scourge of racism or to lessen the plight of indigenous peoples.
Maybe activists miscalculated, accidentally giving Snyder a gift worth more than they ever could have realized: the ability to display morality publicly without sacrificing. Or maybe it’s merely a coincidence that 18 months after the name change came Snyder’s greatest hot streak in his two decades of owning the franchise. In March 2021, the NFL approved a financing scheme that allowed Snyder to buy out his infamously mutinous co-owners, boosting his stake in the team from 60% to 100%. The league investigation into franchise workplace harassment, which was the biggest threat to Snyder’s hold on the team, conveniently fizzled. With the naming problem resolved, talks of a publicly funded stadium in either the District or Loudoun County have reached unprecedented levels of seriousness. Does anyone honestly believe Snyder could have achieved any of this with the national media, major corporations, activist groups, and various politicians so loudly committed to keeping the naming controversy alive? The name change smoothed the way for Snyder’s enrichment and the concealment of rampant misogyny, all so that he can fleece taxpayers for several billion dollars and preserve corporate partnerships.
Nor did the name change achieve any of the other goals of justice or societal healing or, if we are allowed to consider such criteria, the enjoyment of the game of football. It clearly did not give decent people permission to like the Washington NFL franchise. Game attendance plunged by more than 9,000 in the one post-Redskins season in which fans were permitted to attend despite a rare playoff appearance the previous year. That the Washington franchise is now a stunning second-to-last in attendance in the NFL is a corner blitz to the notion that removing the stench of alleged racism would keep fans interested. If anything, the Redskins faithful took the rebrand as yet another signal that the football gods had given them permission not to care anymore.
For a time, the end of the Redskins grated on me for more abstract reasons. The loss of the nickname indicated a societywide failure to live with the cognitive dissonances required to sustain any kind of a tradition or a history. Nations and religious communities and sports franchises are things we might love despite their obvious imperfections and potential for outright evil — basic meaning in life is built out of devotion to flawed institutions and ideas, something Americans used to understand instinctively. To get rid of “Redskins,” despite repeated findings that fewer than a third of Native Americans found the name offensive, seemed like a demand for a kind of perfect justice that American society always had too much wisdom to ever really seek. Nowadays, relieving any conceivable identitarian tension is widely thought to override the bonds of history and community, making the Redskins name change a sign of national regression.
That’s because the whole subject is shot through with moral blackmail that makes common sense dangerous and presents the minority opinion of the overeducated as though it were popular, as though it were the opinion of the oppressed. Demands for a name change were always an elitist slander on the franchise’s loyalists, who are maybe the only local group of people that reflect the full diversity of the Washington metropolitan region. Some of the biggest Redskins fans I knew growing up were the children of immigrants, and more than one Giants fan has told me that the only time they see large numbers of black people in the Meadowlands is when Washington comes to town. The logic of the name change implies that the team’s legions of minority fans lacked the moral evolution, or perhaps the intersectional solidarity, to understand that they were rooting for a symbol of racism. But perhaps their understanding of the Redskins was more sophisticated than that of the team’s critics.
The Redskins have a shameful history on matters of race: Franchise architect George Preston Marshall was a proud white supremacist, and they were by far the last NFL team to field a black player, in 1962. Yet the Redskins were also the first team to win the Super Bowl with a black starting quarterback, Doug Williams, who returned as a longtime front office executive. The great Darrell Green, who is both a thoughtful person and the greatest cornerback of all time, spent his entire 19-year career in Washington.
It would be simplistic to say that minority or liberal-minded fans and athletes forgave the franchise for its past racism. It’s likelier that fans were not in fact making a painful inner accounting of past grievances every time they watched LaVar Arrington scramble an opposing quarterback’s brain. For Redskins fans, the belief in something beyond themselves — in a thing that kept people tethered to their home and to their roots and to each other, something that collapsed the Washington area’s deep geographic, economic, and racial divides for a few hours every Sunday — survived a grim history, a suspect nickname, and seemingly dozens of season-ruining Kirk Cousins interceptions. That endurance used to be something I celebrated. Today, I don’t blame any of my fellow fans if their fraying sense of connection doesn’t survive an indignity worse than any on-field loss: the razing of a franchise’s identity in order to enrich and protect a single awful man who never really grasped the nature of the thing he owns — and who never cared about us at all.
Armin Rosen is a New York-based reporter-at-large for Tablet.
