A Slur by Any Other Name… Still Bigotry

Donald Trump wants the Washington and Cleveland teams to return to the names they had at the beginning of his first presidency. Why?

Because: racist rant, racist rant, racist rant

🏈 Regarding Washington:

There is a great clamoring for this.

Clamoring? Dude, did you read my earlier post about your tragically limited vocabulary and are now just throwing darts at a thesaurus? The only place that phrase appears in popular culture is… wait for it… your own follow-up post about the other team.

The new name is ridiculous and unrecognizable.

Really? “Commanders” is somehow worse to you than Redskins?

Plenty of sports teams have silly names. How about Banana Slugs, Mighty Ducks, Hoyas, or the Wild. But your use of "unrecognizable" in this context? That’s rich. Because you had to have recognized it in order to get upset about it.

Tradition and Patriotism™

And there you have it: MAGA in a nutshell.

Let’s do things the way we’ve always done them in America—even if that means lying, cheating, and socioeconomic domination. Because nothing says “patriotism” like bulldozing over lesser Americans to remind them who’s boss.

⚾ But the most obnoxious, the most insulting reason, was reserved for Cleveland:

Our great Indian people, in massive numbers, want this to happen. Their heritage and prestige is systematically being taken away from them.

Let’s unpack that.

First of all, they were only called “Indians” because Columbus, the hand-chopper-offer himself, thought he was in India.
He wasn’t.

To continue to refer to the original inhabitants of this land using phrases like “merciless Indian Savages” (yeah, direct quote form the Declaration of Independence) speaks to a level of unrepentant, overstated arrogance the likes of which—well—no one has ever seen before. (See what I did there.)

A Local Note

Since I’m from the greater Baltimore/Washington metropolitan area, and chances are you're reading this because you know me, it follows that many of you were fans of the old Washington team. And because it was the home team, you either excused the name, ignored it, or pretended it wasn’t offensive. (Here’s the thing, You don’t get to decide if it was offensive…It wasn’t aimed at you).

So if you're thinking, “Well, maybe Trump has a point... maybe this time it’s kinda sorta okay…”

Let me save you the trouble:

It’s not.

In the words of  Theo Kojak:

That’s a bigoted lie, no matter who said it.

I'm just saying. 

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