By Jim Coffman
Defund the racial slurs!
It has been obvious for a long, long, long time that the Washington (D.C.) football team should change its name. It is as stupidly obvious as obvious can be, with a heaping helping of obvious and obvious on top.
But one crushingly dimwitted (if not just racist and hateful) individual stands in the way. And while I strive to not include personal insults in my columns, I think starting today I will never again refer to owner Dan Snyder without a personal insult until his football team’s goddamned Redskin nickname is changed.
There is news on this front this Thursday morning.
If there is one thing in professional sports that drives me around the bend – as in completely, furiously bonkers – it is the fact that the football team in our nation’s capital continues to call itself what it calls itself. And that was before the post-George Floyd reckoning. Now that nickname is a boil that absolutely, positively, must be lanced.
Dan, you vomitous mass, change the name.
That’s another thing. I’m not just going to use personal insults, I’m going to use personal insults from one of my favorite movies of all time, The Princess Bride. And yes it is as lily white a movie as a movie can be. I just want to acknowledge that here and then hopefully we can move on for now.
So Dan, you warthog-faced buffoon, be aware that we sports fans have seen amazing things happen in past few weeks. We have seen NASCAR convincingly condemn racism in the strongest terms and then disinvite the Confederate flag from its events forevermore.
We have watched as star Mississippi State running back Kylin Hill announced that he would no longer play for the team if the state flag wasn’t changed. (Way to leverage the South’s attachment to college football to beat down the South’s attachment to celebrating the Confederacy, Kylin!)
The Mississippi state government, which had schemed for decades to keep the Confederate flag as a part of its flag, then took all of a weekend to devise and pass a plan to make the big change. And on Monday of this week the previous state flag, which had paid obvious tribute to the racist, treasonous Confederacy, came down for the last time.
This past week the Washington football team was forced by the District of Columbia government to remove a monument celebrating George Preston Marshall, the original owner of the team, from the site of RFK Stadium.
Let’s always remember that Marshall wasn’t just a racist, he was a happy, hateful racist. He loved the fact that his team was a racial slur. When the other owners of other teams in the league, pushed by uber-commissioner Pete Rozelle, decided to finally integrate in the early ’60s, Marshall refused to go along. But even that nightmare of a man knew when he was boxed in and he began to draft Black players in 1962. Marshall was the guy who made the racist connection between an anti-Native American slur and all anti-Blackness clear.
In a league where just a month ago, the otherwise crushingly incompetent Roger Goodell grew a backbone and issued a straightforward statement that he and the NFL had been wrong to react to Colin Kaepernick’s protest of the national anthem the way they did, Snyder has nowhere to go. Literally.
As longtime non-voting DC congresswoman Eleanor Norton Holmes pointed out last week, the only centrally-located site (i.e., convenient to fans from the district, Virginia and Maryland) that is even a little bit feasible for a new Washington football team stadium is on the site of the old RFK Stadium in the district. And the district ain’t letting the racial slurs in unless the name changes.
There is only one path toward redemption for you Dan! It is to call a press conference, work up a little fake emotion and announce that you have seen the light! You will change the name!
More remarkable things have happened. Just in the last week.
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Jim “Coach” Coffman welcomes your comments.
Posted on July 2, 2020