On Tuesday, the Washington Post once again went after the Washington Redskins nickname, calling the moniker “shameful” and “offensive.”
In his editorial, sports columnist Barry Svrluga demanded that NFL team Owner Daniel Snyder eliminate the name his team has had since 1933.
“Now is the time. Sorry, long past the time,” Svrluga wrote to the NFL owner. “If the NFL season opens as planned with training camps this summer, Washington’s team should do so under another name. Under its new name. Whatever that might be. Put it on the ballot, and then mail it in!”
Svrluga went on to insist that the team name is “offensive on the face of it,” and Snyder should be on “the right side of history” even though the NFL owner had several polls that showed that Native Americans were not at all offended by the team’s name.
The Post scribbler went on with the “even if only some” people are offended logic in eliminating the team’s name:
But if it wasn’t obvious then, it sure is now. The same arguments for changing the name that have been applied over the years apply now: If even some Native Americans are offended, that’s too many. The prism through which we see them has changed, and that’s great. It’s not an honorific. It is a stereotype at a time when we can’t afford them because we need to see people not as groups defined by their differences but as individuals defined by what we all share, which is a base level of humanity.
Svrluga next made the story about himself by apologizing for using the name “Redskins” in his past reporting.
“I was wrong to handle it that way, and it took the events of the past two weeks for me to understand that. Silence is complicity. Change the name,” he said, prostrating himself before today’s left-wing assault on traditions.
Svrluga equated deleting the name “Redskins” to the ongoing flaps over Confederate statues, specifically that of Confederate General Robert E. Lee, whose statue in Richmond, Virginia, has once again become the focus for virtue-signaling liberals.
Apply that thinking not to a civic monument or, in Bragg’s case, to a military institution. The NFL took a major step this month when Commissioner Roger Goodell — finally, mercifully — apologized for not listening to the league’s players when it came to matters of systemic racism and police brutality against African Americans. No, none of the 32 teams has signed Colin Kaepernick — yet — and the apology could have been replaced by an honest conversation four years ago. But why double down on a wrong rather than make it right, even if you’re late in doing so?
Svrluga suggested that government officials should refuse to allow Snyder to retain the name Redskins by telling Snyder he won’t be allowed to move into a new stadium partially funded by public cash unless he changes the name.
“But how, in these times, do you raise kids in the nation’s capital, ask them to look at the pain and the strife racial injustice has caused in their hometown and their home country, walk them through steps they can take to make things better, and then have them Hail to the Redskins on Sundays? It’s so incongruent it makes your head hurt,” Svrluga wrote.
The writer ended his harangue demanding that Snyder “must” change the team’s name.
“He must. For what it says about how we view each other. For what it says about our times. For what it would say about our future, a future in which we listen, learn and try to understand rather than dig in and defy for the sake of defiance,” Svrluga concluded.
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