Mike Licht
This article is published as a preview of our upcoming issue.
He said it would never happen. He taunted those in the Native American and activist communities who demanded that he get with the times. He told USA Today: “We’ll never change the name. It’s that simple. NEVER. You can use caps.”
His name is Daniel Snyder, the billionaire owner of an infamous professional football team in Washington, D.C., and he has been officially humbled by forces beyond his plutocratic control.
Dan Snyder’s great passion over the past twenty-one years in which he has owned the team hasn’t been winning football or creating a fun fan experience. It’s been clinging to what the dictionary defines as a “contemptuous term” for Native Americans as the team’s moniker.
“We owe this to the struggle of the Black community. We always do. They are our leaders in this country for social justice. Always have been. Every success we’ve had has been made possible by their courage.”
Snyder belligerently ignored the dozens of Native American groups, tribal councils, and individuals who urged him to change this name. “Many people need to understand that mascots are meant to be ridiculed, tortured, laughed at, and demonized,” commented Amanda Blackhorse, a leading fighter against the name. “Native people have been victims long enough. We are done with that. Our culture isn’t a free market.”
But now Snyder, kicking and screaming, publicly agreed to change the name—in a statement on a corporate letterhead that used the racist slur seven times. This team owner, who gave $1 million to Trump’s inaugural committee, made it official in language more suited to a child being forced to eat their vegetables than someone who actually grew to understand what they were doing.
Knowing what we know about Snyder, the question of “why” becomes paramount. Why did this petty man finally decide to make a change he had fought for decades?
A popular analysis holds that he did so entirely because of the money. As Eugene Robinson noted in The Washington Post, the announcement came one day after “the team’s most visible corporate sponsor, FedEx—which holds the naming rights for the team’s home stadium, FedEx Field—requested that the team’s name be changed.” Other major sponsors, including PepsiCo, Nike, and Bank of America, joined in asking for this change. Nike even stopped selling Washington football gear through its website.
Credit is also due to the fifty-state national uprising against racism that has followed the police murder of George Floyd and to the decades-long struggle by Native American activists to force an end to racist branding.
“Without BLM’s activism and basically changing the playing field, change would not have happened,” Jackie Keeler, the co-founder of the organization Eradicating Offensive Native Mascotry tells me. “We owe this to the struggle of the Black community. We always do. They are our leaders in this country for social justice. Always have been. Every success we’ve had has been made possible by their courage.”
Corporations are facing the fact that the younger generation is more progressive, diverse, and less tolerant of intolerance. For these corporate entities to survive in the decades ahead, they needed to force this name change or ditch their association with Snyder. But the only reason the anti-racist energy of the BLM movement was linked with the name of a football team is because of years of tireless work by activists on the ground.
As the Navajo Nation said in its press release following the team’s announcement: “This change did not come about willingly by the team’s owners, but by the mounting pressure and advocacy of Indigenous peoples such as Amanda Blackhorse, and many other warriors who fought long and hard for this change.”
Let the last word go to Suzan Shown Harjo, a Native woman of Cheyenne and Hodulgee Muscogee descent who is president of the Morning Star Institute, a national Indigenous-rights organization in Washington, D.C. Harjo told Indian Country Today: “We’ve ended more than two-thirds of these obscenities and now have only 900 or so left to go, but the fall of this king of the mountain of trash will help others to give up their ghosts of racism even faster.”