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Corporate Sponsors Finally Join Native American Call for Washington Redskins Name Change
Investor coalition worth $620 billion pushed FedEx, Pepsi, and Nike to change stance, prompting team owner to announce a review of the name.
Jul 03, 2020
Washington Redskins owner Dan Snyder announced Friday that he would conduct a "thorough review" of his NFL team's racist name, which has been the target of protests for decades by Indigenous people and other critics who say the name amounts to a harmful slur.
Snyder's announcement comes after at least five decades of public actions by Indigenous tribes and civil rights organizations, but the catalyst for the review appeared to be demands made by the team's corporate partners.
FedEx, which sponsors the Redskins' home stadium and whose CEO is a partial owner of the team, released a statement Thursday saying, "We have communicated to the team in Washington our request that they change the team name."
Nike also removed Redskins merchandise from its online store on Thursday. The two companies, along with PepsiCo, last week received letters from 87 of their investors--worth a collective $620 billion--calling on them to end their business partnerships with the Redskins unless the team changed its name.
Snyder's signal that a potential name change could be forthcoming came after decades of outcry from Indigenous people, all of which he dismissed in 2013 by claiming he would "never change the name."
In 1968, the National Congress of American Indians launched its first campaign aimed at removing harmful stereotypes and images from U.S. media and popular culture. Four years later, 11 activists approached the team for the first time to request a name change, and in 1992, an estimated 3,000 people demonstrated at the Super Bowl to demand the change in the largest-ever protest over the issue.
"Money changes everything," the anti-bigotry campaign Sleeping Giants tweeted on Friday.
\u201cYesterday, investors and sponsors demanded that the Redskins change their name.\n\nMoney changes everything.\u201d— Sleeping Giants (@Sleeping Giants) 1593790690
Snyder's announcement came amid historic racial injustice protests across the U.S., sparked by the killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery.
Snyder has also faced recent pressure from elected officials to change the Redskins' name, as he aims to move the team from FedEx Field in Maryland to RFK Stadium in Washington, D.C., the city the team represents. The stadium sits on government-owned land and lawmakers including Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D.C.) have demanded the name change before Snyder purchases the stadium.
"He has got a problem he can't get around, and he particularly can't get around it today, after the George Floyd killing," said Norton.
Rep. Raul Grijalva (D-Ariz.) has also demanded the name be changed, saying it is up to Snyder to "step into this century."
"There is no way to justify" keeping the name, Grijalva said Thursday.
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The Ongoing Kaepernick Controversy Shows Much of White America Is Still in 'Slave Patrol' Mode
There’s a long history of whites trashing blacks when they protest the systems whites have put in place to keep them down
Sep 10, 2018
The slave patrols live.
Just ask any of the people at Nike who answer the phones and are dealing with an avalanche of angry white callers throwing the N-word around and complaining about Nike treating Kaepernick with respect. Trump, Pence, and billionaire Rupert Murdoch's Fox News are ginning up even more racist hysteria on a near-daily basis.
But this doesn't come out of thin air. There's a long history of whites trashing blacks when they protest the systems whites have put in place to keep them down.
Policing people of color, which our history teaches was a "government function" handled by the southern states back in the day, was actually a largely civilian effort, although it depended on the support and constant encouragement of political leaders within government.
Policing people of color, which our history teaches was a "government function" handled by the southern states back in the day, was actually a largely civilian effort, although it depended on the support and constant encouragement of political leaders within government.
So, too, today's largely civilian, male, and white "slave patrols" are on the lookout for anybody who may support Colin Kaepernick in his protests of police killings of unarmed black people. And those civilians, being called to arms by Trump and Pence with lies that Kaepernick doesn't "respect" the flag or the national anthem, are flooding into the public square, from Twitter to retail stores.
At the core of modern American policing (particularly in the South), and at the creation of the Second Amendment, we find the slave patrols that were the first militia of the southern states. They're also essential to the modern neo-confederate and white supremacist efforts to demonize black people whenever they stand up for their rights.
In Georgia, for example, a generation before the American Revolution, the colonial government passed laws in 1755 and 1757 that required all white men 17-47 years old to be members of the Georgia Militia, and for those armed Militia members to make monthly inspections of the quarters of every slave in the state. The law defined which counties had which armed militias, and explicitly required armed militia members to keep a keen eye out for slaves who may be planning uprisings.
As Dr. Carl T. Bogus wrote for the University of California Law Review in 1998, "The Georgia statutes required patrols, under the direction of commissioned militia officers, to examine every plantation each month and authorized them to search 'all Negro Houses for offensive Weapons and Ammunition' and to apprehend and give twenty lashes to any slave found outside plantation grounds."
It's the answer to the question raised by the character played by Leonardo DiCaprio in Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained when he asks, "Why don't they just rise up and kill the whites?" If the movie were real, it would have been a purely rhetorical question, because every southerner of the era knew the simple answer: well regulated militias kept the slaves in chains.
Sally E. Hadden, in her book Slave Patrols: Law and Violence in Virginia and the Carolinas notes that, "Although eligibility for the Militia seemed all-encompassing, not every middle-aged white male Virginian or Carolinian became a slave patroller." There were exemptions so "men in critical professions" like judges, legislators, and wealthy white students could stay at their work. Generally, though, she documents how most southern men - including physicians and ministers - had to serve on slave patrol in the militia at one time or another in their lives.
And slave rebellions were keeping the slave patrols busy.
By the time the Constitution was ratified, hundreds of substantial slave uprisings had occurred across the South. Blacks outnumbered Whites in large areas, and the state militias were used to both prevent and to put down slave uprisings. As Dr. Bogus points out, slavery can only exist in the context of a police state, and the enforcement of that police state was the explicit job of the gun toting mostly civilian militias.
As I've written before, the Second Amendment was written the way it was - mentioning "state" instead of, as in its original version, "country" - to allow the southern states to keep their militias intact, and those militias were overwhelmingly slave patrols.
As a result, for the two-plus centuries since then, American police - and, in the 19th century, American slave patrollers - have largely had carte blanche to execute black men who they think are "out of line."
In the 21st century the publicly-known (and partial) list of the victims of this white and "blue" violence runs long: Akiel Denkins, Gregory Gunn, Samuel DuBose, Brendon Glenn, Freddie Gray, Natasha McKenna, Walter Scott, Christian Taylor, Michael Brown, Ezell Ford, Eric Garner, Akai Gurley, Laquan McDonald, Tamir Rice, Yvette Smith, Jamar Clark, Rekia Boyd, Shereese Francis, Ramarley Graham, Manuel Loggins Jr., Sean Bell, Ronald Madison, and Kendra James (among others).
Not to mention Treyvon Martin, killed by the most notorious recent civilian volunteer "slave patroller," George Zimmerman.
None of the killers of any of these human beings are in prison for that crime. All of the killers were afforded great deference and privilege - something that wouldn't have happened if they'd been European cops - because of our uniquely long history of slave patrols.
Our history is also filled with stories and anecdotes about times black people protested this treatment - the story of the response to the brutal murder of Emmit Till is probably best known in the 20th century. There was also the murder of Jimmie Lee Jackson, a protest known now as the Selma to Montgomery march.
Protest has now moved from the streets to social media, and then into the venue most visible to white men in American public life: the NFL's football fields.
Predictably, this inflamed the older white men who run the GOP - particularly President Trump and Vice President Pence - who are regularly shouting out to today's somewhat less organized but no less enthusiastic "slave patrollers," encouraging them to "police" the unruly African Americans among us.
At the top of Trump and Pence's hit list is Colin Kaepernick, who began the protests against these police killings.
But in order to sanitize the naked racism of Trump, Pence, and their lickspittles at Fox News, they had to add a twist to the story: the lie that Kaepernick "hates" and "doesn't respect" the flag and the national anthem.
But in order to sanitize the naked racism of Trump, Pence, and their lickspittles at Fox News, they had to add a twist to the story: the lie that Kaepernick "hates" and "doesn't respect" the flag and the national anthem. Fox has even gone so far as to have (white) soldiers' widows come on and respond to leading questions about Kaepernick "disrespecting" their dead husbands.
But Fox and Trump/Pence have it all wrong, as they well know.
If you're going to protest police killings of black people during the national anthem, the most respectful way to do it, according to many veterans, is to take a knee. Kaepernick got the idea from special forces veteran Nate Boyer, who suggested to him that he should consider going to his knee to respectfully protest the police killings, rather than just sitting on the bench.
"Soldiers take a knee in front of a fallen brother's grave, you know, to show respect," Boyer told a reporter he'd told Kaepernick. "When we're on a patrol, you know, and we go into a security halt, we take a knee, and we pull security. ... [P]eople take a knee to pray. So for me it was a common ground, at least, to start from."
Kaepernick loved the idea and adopted it, and now this respectful, almost prayerful protest has spread across the NFL. And Trump and Pence are cynically using it as new and useful shorthand for "uppity black people" that they can use to call out the modern-day slave patrol.
What's so breathtaking about the entire thing is how often the media in America allows Trump's and Pence's slanders of Kaepernick to go unchallenged when its repeated in speeches and rallies. Trump, Pence, and hard-right media have clearly adopted the model, "When one lies, it should be a big lie, and one should stick to it."
But Americans are figuring it out.
Just as African Americans have been economically disenfranchised since the founding of America, the white billionaire owners of the NFL are continuing that tradition by denying Kaepernick an opportunity to practice his craft. Now Trump and Pence are encouraging the NFL to extend that economic segregation, that redlining, to any other players who may join the protest.
Nike has now stepped up to embrace Kaepernick, in what many Republicans are calling a "crazy" marketing campaign, which has brought this all to the top of the news again. But is it crazy?
Maybe. Or maybe it's just crazy enough to finally wake white America up to what's been happening for centuries to our black brothers and sisters.
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Don't Let Colin Kaepernick's Message Get Swamped by the Nike Swoosh
Nike's co-opting of Kaepernick's "resistance" may broaden its appeal, but his testimony shouldn't get lost in a sea of commerce
Sep 09, 2018
Colin Kaepernick's status as a global cultural icon of resistance has never seemed more secure. After two years of being seen as a symbol of radical dissent, and after one season of being shut out of the National Football League for daring to use the national anthem as a vehicle to protest police violence and racial inequity, he has reemerged this week with an explosive impact, as the face--and voice--of the 30th anniversary of Nike's "Just Do It" campaign.
The campaign is genius when it comes to commerce, but commodifying rebellion contains pitfalls about which Kaepernick and his legions of admirers should be aware.
There are black-and-white billboards that show his face and the simple slogan, "Believe in something. Even if it means sacrificing everything" up in Times Square and San Francisco's Union Square. A slickly produced TV ad uses the quarterback's voice, speaking over a series of inspirational images of athletic achievement, ending with him saying the same phrase.
A video of the ad went viral as soon as it dropped last week, producing an incalculable amount of free advertising for Nike and proving that in our social media landscape, the opposite of love is not hate but indifference.
Every post of someone rejoicing over the campaign, saying they would buy more Nike gear to show their support, or burning their sneakers because they don't like Kaepernick, only further cements his in-your-face legend and implants in people's minds the ubiquitous swoosh. Nike took its support for rebellion a step further by buying airtime to debut the commercial during the NFL's Thursday night opening game, in the forum that is expressly trying to put Kaepernick and flag controversies behind it.
The campaign is genius when it comes to commerce, but commodifying rebellion contains pitfalls about which Kaepernick and his legions of admirers should be aware.
The corporation projecting Kaepernick's voice, after his studious avoidance of interviews and sound bites, has a decades-long record of taking rebel athletes, marketing their appeal, but stripping their rebellion of all content.
In the 1980s, Nike took a young filmmaker named Spike Lee and used his filmmaking prowess to project Michael Jordan's new line of Air Jordan sneakers. Nike told us that John McEnroe was a Rebel With a Cause, without ever telling us exactly what that cause happened to be. Nike gave us Tiger Woods as some kind of political trailblazer, even though the actual Tiger Woods wanted no part of the political responsibility that came with his politicized brand.
When you watch Kaepernick's Nike commercial, hear his voice and words, it is bracing. He has said so little recently, beyond the occasional tweet, even as President Trump and his minions used the Kaepernick protest--NFL players kneeling when "The Star Spangled Banner" was sung on game days--as a punching bag. While others appeared on CNN and the Sunday news shows to defend the right to protest, he remained silent, content to pursue a lawsuit against the NFL for collusion.
But now we are hearing him through Nike's corporate messaging, expressing words someone wrote--was it Kaepernick?--about believing in yourself, pursuing a passion. That's a beautiful message but not altogether different from what any athlete might say. There is nothing in the ad about police violence or systemic racism or any of the issues that animated Kaepernick's actions in the first place.
Nike is appealing to a restive, even radical youth market far more likely to see athletes like LeBron James, Serena Williams, and Kaepernick as heroes than villains. Nike calculates that it doesn't need older football fans who think Kaepernick is un-American. It knows it can profit on its stars' role in the zeitgeist, their edginess. But there is a pernicious motive behind the radical chic.
For decades, Nike has been criticized for corporate behavior that couldn't be more at odds with its idealist, rebellious messaging. It's not a company sacrificing for good.
For decades, Nike has been criticized for corporate behavior that couldn't be more at odds with its idealist, rebellious messaging. It's not a company sacrificing for good. A U.S. organization, United Students Against Sweatshops, has been a constant thorn in its side because of its labor practices in China and Southeast Asia. USAS tours workers from Nike factories on college campuses and organizes athletes to demand an end to sweatshops or their schools will break ties with the shoe behemoth.
Women who worked at Nike have described an internal sexist atmosphere that was "toxic." In April, the New York Times published an expose and high-profile executives exited.
Nike founder Phil Knight underwrites candidates from the very Republican Party that has been demonizing Colin Kaepernick.
In addition to delivering a stirring message, Nike is using the man and the voice, his charitable giving and admirable works as a fig leaf for its own malfeasance.
None of this is to criticize Kaepernick for taking Nike's money. He has every right to earn a living, especially since the NFL, whether it's collusion or not, hasn't allowed him to pursue his craft.
Nike's co-opting of Kaepernick's "resistance" may broaden its appeal, but his testimony shouldn't get lost in a sea of commerce. Otherwise, the message will get strangled by the same swoosh that's bringing Kaepernick's voice back to life.
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