The 2020 murder of George Floyd at the hands of police sent a cultural shockwave through the United States. It was, in fact, a focal point of the American “culture wars” that are still being waged today. Floyd’s murder sparked countless protests and counterprotests throughout the country, placed discussions about police reform in the public spotlight, and led to a nationwide racial reckoning that hasn’t yet subsided. One facet of this reckoning was an unprecedentedly vast flurry of corporate rebrands and commitments to social justice initiatives. This involved the names of notable products, musicians, sports teams, and others being changed.
Two sports franchises that had long been accused of caricaturizing Native Americans–the NFL’s Washington Redskins and the MLB’s Cleveland Indians–executed two of the most notable post-George Floyd rebrands. The Redskins cleaned themselves of any Native American iconography and renounced their pejorative “Redskins” moniker, while the Indians got rid of the offensively stereotypical “Chief Wahoo” and became the Guardians. The former was, for a time, the “Washington Football Team” as they awaited a final decision on a new name. In 2022, they landed on the Washington Commanders, their name to this day.
But who could’ve guessed that three years later, as the Commanders were finalizing talks to build a new stadium in DC, that the culturally cantankerous Commander-in-chief would attempt a reversal?
In July, President Trump decided that he wanted the racism back. In fact, he wanted it back so badly that he threatened to obstruct the stadium deal if the Commanders didn’t go back to being the Redskins. He also expressed his desire to see the Guardians reverse their rebrand. Trump insisted on Truth Social that the Commanders “would be much more valuable” and the deal “would be more exciting for everyone” if the team executed his proposed racist regression.
What’s perhaps most interesting about this nonsense is that Trump and white supremacists like him represent the most racially sensitive class in the country, if not the world. Can you imagine the hell they’d raise over a team calling themselves the “Pinkskins” while parading a mascot modeled after a Caucasian salaryman? Look at how they cry foul over the imagined anti-white biases of antiracist protests and simply using the word “Black.” In their hypocrisy-laced upside-down world, these are racist and unacceptable but branding that the targeted group has been upset about for decades is apparently perfectly within bounds.
As we also find in the case of unrest over Confederate flags and monuments, affirmative action, and DEI initiatives, any step toward racial progress and redress constitutes an existential threat. White supremacists and other self-aware beneficiaries of racism know that a step toward the right direction is necessarily a step away from the white direction. I know that the bigots in question are liable to take that maxim and run with it, which, appropriately, is another mark of their ironic hypersensitivity. It is of course white supremacists who must be denounced, not white people, though the latter could stand to better mark the difference.