Our Scott McKay is so right in his latest column, “Don’t You Dare Call That Team the Red Tails.” The admirable Tuskegee Airmen made too great a contribution to America’s defense, facing more opposition than Luftwaffe fighters, to be dragged down by association with the sorry collection of privileged millionaire players, many of them whiners and/or thugs, and virtue-signaling team owners and league executives that make up today’s squalid NFL. I wouldn’t trade one of those brave pilots for Roger Goodell and all the social justice warriors in the NFL’s swanky new Park Avenue offices.
The well-upholstered Park Avenue humbugs, in an effort to prove to the world, and perhaps to themselves, that they are soooo good, are battling the faux enemy of “systemic racism” with pointless gestures. (As Thomas Sowell recently put it, even the people who wholesale this baseless charge have no idea what they mean by systemic racism.) The Tuskegee airmen fought America’s real enemies with skill, nerve, and six Browning .50-caliber machine guns. They returned home to far less appreciation and respect than they deserved. They don’t deserve to be besmirched now.
I much enjoyed some of the suggestions for new names for Washington’s now sorry team made by commenters on McKay’s column. Washington Weasels is very fine. The Washington Snowflakes is also apt. I make bold to advance for consideration the Washington PCs. But I think the most obvious and fitting handle for a team representing today’s Washington, which is so woke is has to be on uppers, is the Washington White Liberals.
Survey after survey has identified white liberals as the major group that is offended by the name Redskins. And this bunch, whose main goal in life seems to be to disturb the peace, is offended by just about everything. Every poll of real American Indians, not the professional Indians who live in and around Washington or are paid-up members of the indignation industrial complex, finds an overwhelming majority either like Indian-themed team names or at least are not offended by them. Once again, identity politics–obsessed white liberals are nagging other groups about what they ought to be offended by.
Case in point, Red Mesa High school, located on the Navajo reservation in Apache County Arizona, has a sports-team mascot: the Redskins. In a 2014 poll of Red Mesa students and teachers, 88 percent of students and 70 percent of teachers said they didn’t consider the term “redskins” a racial slur. “I don’t find it derogatory,” Red Mesa superintendent Tommie Yazee said. “It’s a source of pride.” This is easy enough to understand, unless one happens to be a white liberal.
’Skins owner Dan Snyder held out for the longest time under great pressure from leftist nags, protesting he would never change the team’s name. But when corporate America came down on his head, he was finally forced to surrender. Big-foot retailers like Amazon, Target, Walmart, and Dick’s Sporting Goods stopped selling Redskins gear. But the last and probably biggest shoe to drop was when FedEx, which pays $8 million a year to have its name on the Redskins ballyard in suburban Maryland, said if the team did not do what white liberals demanded, the company would take its name off the stadium. Snyder was faced with changing the team’s name or hemorrhaging millions, with bankruptcy a real possibility.
So more than anything else, this victory for left-wing cultural tyranny can be laid at the feet of a formerly conservative corporate America, the flag officers of which are so woke now it’s a wonder they can get to sleep at night. It’s a subject for another day to wonder how these folks got this way. Surely they’re too intelligent to imagine that the majority of their customer base is really offended by names like the Redskins, or by Aunt Jemima on a pancake box. The quick explanation that most recommends itself is that the leftist indoctrination of the liberal arts departments at our universities has metastasized to the colleges of business, which are now also cranking out social justice warriors.
I guess at least Bob Costas is sleeping well at night. Here’s his sermonette on the subject from a few years back. This one alone won Bob his virtue-signaling merit badge. There’s no better exemplar of the white liberal mindset than this pathetic catechism, where Bob instructs American Indians that they don’t know when they’re being insulted and he will protect them.
It’s hard to see where all of this is headed, and what the future holds for the NFL, America’s most popular sports league, where, it appears, everyone is Colin Kaepernick now. The systemic racism slander has taken over the NFL, and white ticket buyers and those who catch a game on TV will now be instructed in various ways on what racist scum they are, and how terrible the country they love is. No one should be shocked if this goes over like the proverbial you-know-what in the punch bowl. It’s not inconceivable that in a few years NFL will stand for No Fans Left. Should this come to pass, it will not have happened to a more deserving bunch. Until about the day before yesterday, sports was a unifying, politics-free zone. It should have stayed this way. Spectator sports may turn out to be yet another institution that destroys itself by trying to become “relevant.” After a hard week’s work, the last thing that guy with the TV remote in his hand wants to be on Sunday afternoon is relevant. He just want to enjoy the #$%^&! game. He doesn’t want to be called a closet ku-kluxer.
Some takeaways:
(1) White liberals have waaay too much time on their hands and too perfervid an imagination when rooting up offenses.
(2) What this country needs is a lot more inactivists.
(3) If you want to know what systemic racism was all about, you could ask one of the few surviving members of the Tuskegee Airmen. They would know. But don’t waste your time with Roger Goodell, Colin Kaepernick, or Bob Costas.
And you might say a prayer for Dan Snyder. White liberals have a lot more in store for him.
