The battle over the Redskins’ name is about the exploitation of a stereotype for profit - The Washington Post: Taking on the persona of a free-ranging Indian warrior can be a welcome and seemingly harmless seasonal escape. I’ve been there, whooping it up from the stands at RFK Stadium in the 1970s to FedEx Field — until 2000, the year of my epiphany.
You might even say we were honoring Native Americans by ingesting the spirit of the “noble savage,” taking revenge on their behalf by figuratively scalping the Dallas Cowboys on a Thanksgiving afternoon.
In an intensified effort to shore up the discredited fantasy, team owner Daniel Snyder has taken to conjuring Indian support — trotting out fake Native Americans and manufacturing facts about the glorious origin of a team name widely regarded as a racial slur.
On Monday, at the request of Snyder’s representatives, the leader of a Nevada tribe was supposed to attend a news media event with Snyder. But the leader has since backed out, and now the hunt is on for a stand-in Snyder can trot out at another news media event scheduled for Wednesday.
