Washington Wokesters? On Bended Knee, Redskins Drop Team Name, Logo
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It was just three years ago that a SCOTUS ruling restored the Washington Redskins’ trademark protection, after it was revoked in 2014 under the Lanham Act’s “Disparagement Clause.” The court couldn’t provide cultural protection, however. And now, the “woke” mob has accomplished what the law couldn’t do: Compel the football team to drop its 88-year-old name and its logo, which it officially did on Monday (press release below).

 

 

Interestingly, No-longer-Redskins owner Dan Snyder had vowed in 2013, “We’ll never change the name,” as USA Today reported at the time. “It’s that simple. NEVER — you can use caps.”

Yes, well, we didn’t know he meant CAPitulation and CAPriciousness. But, hey, maybe one of those pods appeared under his bed just recently. Then again, it’s a completely different country than it was seven years ago, what with our rooted-to-nothing-eternal, infantilized (or as some say, “woke”) civilization’s continual unguided change.

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Of course, perhaps pressure from the sponsors — who, do note, the No-longer-Redskins mentioned in their statement first — was just too much. But to whom, then, are the sponsors bowing?

Certainly not American Indians. As a respondent under the football team’s statement tweeted:

 

 

(An article on the poll is here.)

This isn’t surprising since the Redskins’ logo was actually the handiwork of Indians themselves, as the tweet below relates:

 

 

As for the name, “There are Native American schools that call their teams Redskins, CBSDC reported in 2013. “The term is [also] used affectionately by some natives, similar to the way the N-word is used by some African-Americans.”

Then there are the self-identified Indian Twitter users who responded to the No-longer-Redskins’ statement and who reflect the poll, as the selection below indicates:

 

 

 

 

 

So, interestingly, most of this anti-Redskin agitation (and cancel culture in general) appears the work of left-wing palefaces. Comedian-cum-commentator Bill Maher, while often funny only in his thinking, did make a good point about this last year in saying, “White liberals have to start listening to me when I tell them, ‘You can’t be more offended than the victim’” (video below. Warning: No guarantee of sanity beyond the two-minute mark!).

Of course, as these leftists bear their white man’s burden and do the jobs minorities won’t do (cultural destruction), missed is that we tend to have a soft spot in our hearts for our continent’s Indians — and imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.

Why do we, after all, assign Indian names and symbols to sports teams? We don’t have NFL franchises called the Cleveland Wussies, San Francisco Dandies, or Minnesota Metrosexuals. We name teams the “Braves,” “Sioux,” or “Redskins” only out of admiration, the idea being that American Indians represent the quintessence of the warrior ethic.

Many Indians fully appreciate this, too. As an example, CBSDC quoted Eunice Davidson, “a Dakota Sioux who lives on the Spirit Lake reservation in North Dakota,” as saying that the Redskins’ name “more or less shows that they approve of our history.” She also said that “if she could speak to Dan Snyder,” wrote CBSDC, she’d say, “‘We don’t want our history to be forgotten.’”

But Davidson has company in being ignored. CBSDC also told us that North Dakota was the scene of a controversy similar to the Redskin’s one “over the state university’s Fighting Sioux nickname. It was decisively scrapped in a 2012 statewide vote — after the Spirit Lake reservation voted in 2010 to keep it.”

But now that the No-longer-Redskins have followed suit, it’s fitting we help the team find a new name. Here are some suggestions:

• The Washington Weenies

• The Washington Snowflakes

• The Washington Jellyfish

• The Washington Kneelers

• The Washington Wokesters

But the winner perhaps is the following by a Twitter respondent:

 

 

Of course, Indian logos are often stereotypical. But so what?

Consider: Years ago a great friend of mine bought his children a DVD of older cartoons, the kind I watched as a child. The disc opened with a warning about how the works contained stereotypes, alluding to the portrayals of Chinese, Arabs, and others. But here’s the thing: I never once while watching these cartoons had a negative thought about the groups in question. I’m confident my friends didn’t, either. On the contrary, seeing an American Indian in a headdress, an Arab in robe and turban, or an Indian charming a King Cobra made their cultures intensely intriguing. I can’t imagine having been all that interested in visiting India (which I did) if an Indian character had been portrayed as a London engineer with a clipped British accent.

But none of this matters to SJWs who live in a superficial world, having forgotten how it’s the thought that counts. Jesus taught this (that even adultery of “the heart” matters), but the SJWs, disconnected from Truth, represent a regression to pagan morality. Why, this is what their value signaling is all about: presenting a pretense of supposed goodness to win social approval.

Ergo the NFL, with its kneeling, “Black National Anthem” before games, and, now, a scrapped Indian name and logo. My, what decisions — and I bet that when you heard about football’s head-trauma problem, you thought it just affected the players.

Image: screenshot from Twitter post

Selwyn Duke (@SelwynDuke) has written for The New American for more than a decade. He has also written for The Hill, Observer, The American Conservative, WorldNetDaily, American Thinker, and many other print and online publications. In addition, he has contributed to college textbooks published by Gale-Cengage Learning, has appeared on television, and is a frequent guest on radio.