On Monday, the ownership of the Washington Redskins announced that they’ll be retiring the Redskins nickname from Washington D.C.’s professional football team. They don’t know what the new name will be yet, but they’re in the process of choosing one. I was raised as a Washington fan, so this was kind of a weird announcement for me. 20 years ago, I probably would have been yelling about how stupid the name change is. 10 years ago, I probably would have been pretty irritated and rolled my eyes and shook my head. But today? Today I feel mostly okay with it.
I think your reaction to the name-change probably has a lot to do with how and where you were raised. I grew up in Newport News, which is in southeastern Virginia. We didn’t have a professional football team nearby. I guess some people were Baltimore (Colts at the time) fans because Maryland wasn’t too far away. But most of the people around us were Redskins fans because it was only about a three-hour drive north along I-64 and I-95 to Washington, D.C.
For me, the attachment was about more than just proximity. When I was a kid, I had no clue how close RFK Stadium was. My dad was a Redskins fan, and his dad was before him. They had t-shirts and hats and sweatshirts and towels, and we watched the team on TV every Sunday. I knew—and still know—the names of their best players: Joe Theismann, John Riggins, Art Monk, Joe Jacoby, Russ Grimm (and all the Hogs). I watched the 1983, 1988, and 1992 Super Bowl wins, even though I mostly remember the Doritos and Dr. Pepper and the commercials. (The halftime shows were hot garbage all three years.)
I remember my parents taking my brother and me to RFK Stadium for a few games when we were kids, and it was a blast every time. They played the Colts one year, the Dolphins another, and then the Eagles the last time we went. We always had Redskins gear on, and my parents bought us standard-issue souvenirs. At the Washington/Philadelphia game, I got a pennant to hang up in my room and my brother got one of those pig noses that were popular because the "Hogs” offensive line unit was huge in the ‘80s. My brother fell asleep on the drive home with his hog nose on, and that image still makes me laugh. This all seems pretty normal to me. I think this is the experience of most people who grow up around sports. Nothing really that unusual.
I also didn’t question the name of the team at all when I was kid. When you're raised in the Chesapeake Bay area, you grow up learning a lot about Native Americans. Newport News is on the coastal peninsula that also includes Jamestown and Yorktown and Williamsburg, so a lot of our local historical stories were about first contacts between English colonists and Native Americans. John Smith, Pocahontas, John Rolfe, the Virginia Company, tobacco and corn and canoes...it was the ‘80s, so a lot of it was pretty whitewashed. But it was still a major part of my childhood.
We learned about regional tribes and we took field trips to see colonial settlements, and Indians were always a major part of those stories. A lot of cities in the southeastern Virginia region have Native American names: Powhatan, Poquoson, Tappahannok, etc. It’s just an inherent part of the culture of the region, and those stories lined up perfectly fine with the Indian head on the Redskins helmet when I was a young. Again—nothing seemed weird or unusual to me.
I didn’t even know the Redskins' name was controversial until I was in college in Georgia in the ‘90s. I read an opinion column about it in a newspaper, and I thought it was incredibly stupid. Why on earth would someone be so wound up about a sports team name that seemed so ordinary and benign? I didn’t think “Redskins” was a racial slur. The team name had been so much a part of my childhood that it didn’t occur to me that it could be offensive. I didn't realize there was a long history of controversy surrounding it going back decades. At the time, I dismissed the whole ridiculous thing out of hand.
…But again, I was in college at the time. And I was questioning (or at least revisiting with a critical eye) a lot of the things I had learned or taken for granted when I was a kid. And as dumb as I thought the Redskins controversy was, it was something that lingered in the back of my head and nagged at me.
As I grew older, it got easier to not have to worry about it. I went to high school and college in Georgia. People didn’t really care who I pulled for because they were all Falcons fans. I went to grad school at The Ohio State University, where college football was king. The Buckeyes were the only thing that mattered, but if pro football was your jam, the local networks broadcast Cleveland, Cincinnati, and Green Bay games every week. And by then, I didn’t really have time to watch much football anyway. I watched Brett Favre play in yellow and green (as God intended) every week, and that was about the extent of my NFL connection.
As the years went by, it got harder and harder to admit publicly that I was a Redskins fan. For one thing, they absolutely sucked. What’s the point in admitting that you're a Washington fan when there’s really no point in pulling for them? When Dan Snyder bought the team in 1999, he systematically dismantled everything that had made the team work and proceeded to run the franchise into the ground in just about every way imaginable. Washington was bad then, but they’ve been consistently, reliably abysmal ever since. "Hail to the Redskins" (the team's fight song) might as well have become "Hell to the Redskins."
Beyond the practical defeatism and nihilism of pulling for Washington, though, it’s hard to say “I’m a Redskins fan” in polite, educated company outside of the East Coast. I mean…we all know by now that Redskins is a historical slur, despite repeated and impassioned attempts by the team and its fans to justify or spin it. I know it. Fans know it. White people know it. Native Americans know it, even if many say the're not particularly offended by it anymore. Everybody else knows it. But it’s somehow been allowed to stand because of history or legacy or tradition or something. Fear of being called the PC Police. Heritage, not hate. Disrupting the tidy throwback of a Cowboys/Indians rivalry. “Honoring” Native Americans by calling them a name that was used against them in casual scorn and derision. We’ve heard all the reasons.
But I still quietly pulled for them…I guess out of a sense of habit or weird residual loyalty. When I started working at Hallmark in Kansas City, I got to write a handful of short stories/bios for Keepsake Ornaments every year. When the Joe Theismann ornament was being planned in 2012/13, I begged to land that bio. I was proud of what I wrote about a quarterback I loved watching, and it brought back a lot of great memories.
In the last ten years, though, I’ve gradually let go of having to carry the burden of the Redskins fandom. There’s no point, for any reason. I might have a lot of personal connections to that team, that mascot, and that logo, but man…that’s not worth perpetually holding onto a racist epithet as a team name.
In some ways, money has made the mascot transition a lot easier. We’re in the middle of a bit of a racial reckoning this year, and a lot of things that should have been reconsidered years ago are getting a second (or third, or hundredth) look. Corporations are starting to take note, too, because they want to land on the right side of this scrutiny. Last week, FedEx (the company that has paid for the naming rights of Washington’s current home stadium for 20 years) threatened to pull its name and sponsorship from the field if ownership doesn’t change the team’s name. Money talks—especially when the team is so terrible that nothing is really lost in a high-profile corporate rebranding.
I know this transition is going to make a lot of people mad. Most of my family is going to be pissed. I’m sure team merchandise will be selling through the roof this week, because people want to hold onto what they’ve known—what they’ve invested in, financially and emotionally. And I get it. I’m from that world. I grew up with it, and I can feel it. Nobody wants to let go of something they’ve instinctively internalized as part of their region or their childhood.
But it’s time to let this one go, folks. There’s no benefit to maintaining the “heritage” and “honor” charade any longer. We can give it up now. Even if it’s difficult to let go of a racist name that you swear isn’t racist, we can at least agree that nothing good has come of this franchise for almost 30 years. Don’t get me wrong—the team name isn’t the reason has sucked so badly. (That’s obviously Snyder and the culture he’s built in and around FedEx Stadium.) But at the very least, it’s time to give this team a new name. Because if you believe “Redskins” is an honorable name, then you have to admit that this team has done a great disservice and dishonor to that name for far too long.
And who knows—the team might actually get better after this. Some sort of karma or curse could be lifted as a result of this move, if you believe in that sort of thing. I personally don’t believe that will happen until Snyder and his buddy Trump are both gone from Washington, but I guess anything could happen. And if it’s something good, it’ll be nice to admit for the first time in a while that I grew up a Washington fan. And maybe when that happens, everyone involved can keep a little bit more of their dignity and know that they did the right thing after too many years of looking the other way.
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