Slate, The New Republic and Mother Jones have announced that they will no longer refer to the NFL’s Washington D.C. team as “the Redskins,” effective as of this past Thursday. (Not that Slate used it much before, Chris Chase at USA Today pointed out: Search results for the team on the site bring up only eight results, and Slate editor David Plotz himself admits in his statement, “When we stop using the name Redskins, hardly anyone will notice.”
Although the offensive name has come under fire before, a young Navajo woman named Amanda Blackhorse, who grew up on a reservation in Arizona, led five other American Indians federal suit against the NFL. If she had the chance, she said, she would ask team owner Daniel Snyder if he would ever call her a “redskin” to her face. (He responded: “I think the best way is to just not comment on that type of stuff,” Snyder said. “I don’t know her.”)
Reuters reports that a number of other outlets have already established a ban against using the team name, specifically The Washington City Paper, Washington online site DCist.com, the Kansas City Star, the Buffalo News and the Philadelphia Daily News.
Not that any of this makes the team’s owner Daniel Snyder consider changing the outdated name: “As a lifelong Redskins fan, and I think that the Redskins fans understand the great tradition and what it’s all about and what it means… We’ll never change the name. It’s that simple. NEVER — you can use caps.”
Other opponents of Slate’s decision have pointed out that “yankee” has been used as a pejorative term.
‘What Slate’s Redskins Decision Says About Editorial Judgment’ [The Atlantic]
‘Slate.com, others to ban ‘Redskins’ from their pages’ [Chicago-Tribune]
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