Mmm... Sounds like they just don’t want to deal with it.
Upthread I mentioned that the family of the original artist really wants the old name back, as do a large chunk of the fandom. I personally still call them the Redskins as I’ve been a fan since 1983 and old habits are hard to break. There were several polls done by the Washington Post about the controversy years ago and, at the risk of sounding like a conspiracy theorist, they basically kept running the polls until they tweaked the sample baseline enough to “prove” that people wanted the name change, when nobody really did.
There were 3 polls to my recollection. I do not recall exact numbers by any stretch, but IIRC the first poll said that around 60-70% were okay with the name (this number was under-estimated - see my
UPDATE below). They didn’t like that result (sadly, I can't find it) so a second poll was run in 2016 and MORE people said they wanted to keep the name. It was up to 90% with that one. Update:
here is the 2016 poll (warning - pay wall pops up after a couple of seconds - fucking WaPo). They
really didn’t like that result. Then, in 2020, UMich and UC-Berkeley ran a
third poll. This time, they cherry-picked the sample base and it went their way. I mean, c'mon... Fucking
Berkeley?? Not likely to find an impartial polling sample there. It didn’t help that
FedEx, under pressure from other activist and advocacy groups at the time, threatened to pull their funding from the team unless Snyder changed the name. All his other sponsors followed suit. I think the US Patent Office (or one of those bureaucratic black holes of taxpayer dollars) even de-legitimized the trademark of the logo, forcing into the public domain. It was around that time that he caved.
There are some who say that he did it out of a newly-found sense of “social justice”. Anyone who knows about that guy knows that’s a laughable bald-faced lie. He was only ever worried about his bottom line. One of the biggest mistakes of the Snyder era, IMO. Some may call me racist for saying so. I don’t really much give a fuck.
UPDATE - I found this interesting little
Wiki site on the subject. There were actually
two opinion polls that were taken before the benchmark 2016 poll by the Washington Post (for a total of 4, including the 2020 UMich/Berkeley poll). The first one was done in
2002 by The Harris Poll for Sports Illustrated. They found that "
81 percent of Native Americans who live outside traditional Indian reservations and
53 percent of Indians on reservations did not find the names or images used by sports teams to be discriminatory." The second was 2004, by the Annenberg Election Survey who stated, "Respondents who identified themselves as Native American were asked: 'The professional football team in Washington calls itself the Washington Redskins. As a Native American, do you find that name offensive or doesn't it bother you?'
Ninety percent replied that the name did not bother them, nine percent said it was offensive, and one percent would not answer."
So, out of 4 polls, 3 of them basically said a vast super-majority of those identifying as Native American either don't care or like the logo/name (up to 90%). Only the Mich/Berkely poll shifts to the "prescribed narrative", which I would find typical. The thumbs were definitely on scales for that one.
UPDATE 2 - The
Times of India (of all people!
) have reported earlier today (December 3, 2024) that "NFL commissioner Roger Goodell and the Washington Commanders' ownership are in discussions with Senate leaders about potentially reinstating the controversial 'Redskins' name and logo."
Can't really find any other articles about it in the legacy media in the US. I wonder why...
So enough of this faux outrage over a big, fat, nothing-burger. Bring back the logo and the name, already, FFS!
Well of course he is.