Slate will no longer refer to Washington’s NFL team by its politically-incorrect nickname—the Redskins. Good thing it has no reason to write much about them; it would be a headline writer’s nightmare. In a tome today, Slate’s David Plotz explains the move while at least giving unpopular owner Daniel Snyder this: “Snyder is a dismal failure as an owner, a megalomaniacal bully, and a frivolous litigant, but I doubt he is a bigot.”
Note to A’s fans: Maybe Lew Wolff isn’t so bad, after all.
It’s a fun read, as evidenced by this excerpt:
Earlier this year, some Redskins flunky was assigned the job of locating high school teams around the country called Redskins, and found 70 of them, which proved very little except that the Redskins are capable of spreading a bad example to the young. (A Google search of “Redskins” “nickname” and “high school” turns up story after story of schools dropping the nickname.) And this May, the team pathetically trotted out a guy named Chief Dodson to explain that his people were “quite honored” by the Redskins name. NFL commissioner Roger Goodell cited Dodson’s support in a letter to the Congressional Native American Caucus, apparently not realizing that the supposedly Redskins-loving Dodson wasn’t really a chief.
