April 8, 2016 2:45 p.m. ET Lest Americans grow bored with immigration, terrorism, confiscatory taxation and other mainstays of campaign chatter, Bernie Sanders has dragged the hapless Washington Redskins into the circus, saying that their pigment-specific moniker is on the “wrong side of history.” Many fans, not to mention team owner Dan Snyder, may feel the same way about Mr. Sanders, yet he is one of 50 senators who signed a letter demanding a Redskins name change. The senators, who always wag a civil tongue, join a dedicated tribe of activists who hope to persuade, or force, Mr. Snyder to relent. It’s enough to make one wonder whyDonald Trump hasn’t beat the anti-PC drums on this subject. Those seeking a deeper understanding of the anti-Skins crusade will find a vibrant apostle in C. Richard King, a professor of comparative ethics at Washington State University who vastly prefers his ethics to those of the Redskins’ faithful. He’s all-pro on this matter, having written widely against the use of Indian mascots. This latest effort is illuminating, in a blowtorch sort of way. Mr. King’s basic argument is straightforward. He considers the name “Redskins” a racial slur. He acknowledges that the name may have originated among American Indians themselves and had positive connotations, but he argues that it was a slur by the time team owner George Preston Marshall chose it in 1933 to replace the name “Braves” for his then Boston-based football team. Mr. King quotes Frank Baum, the author of “The Wizard of Oz,” who wrote (in reference to Sitting Bull’s demise) that “the nobility of the Redskin is extinguished, and what few are left are a pack of whining curs who lick the hand that smites them.” He adds that the first Redskins coach, William Henry “Lone Star” Dietz, who identified as a Lakota Indian, may have been making a false claim about his lineage. (What is it about Boston and questionable assertions of Indian ancestry? If the Senate holds hearings on the issue, one hopes Sen. Warren will offer her unique insights.) The Redskins faithful have another view, summed up by former Chicago Bears coachMike Ditka: “What’s all this stink over the Redskins name? It’s so much horse—. . . . It was said out of reverence, out of pride to the American Indian.” Mr. Snyder—and no doubt most team fans—feel the same way and would likely use the same scatological reference to characterize Mr. King’s insistence that their embrace of the name masks deeper, darker intuitions. Which is probably fine with Mr. King, who seems to enjoy a good scrap. He brings a great deal of passion to the table, starting with the book’s dedication, which includes a hat tip to “haters” (presumably those who disagree with Mr. King). So strong is his dislike of the team name that he refuses to use it, except in the book’s title, preferring the clunky “Washington professional football team.” To utter a word like “Redskins,” he insists, “disappears Native Americans.” It calls “for the exclusion and extermination of the indigenous other.” Fans of this type of writing (known in some quarters as raving) will find a rich feast in “Redskins: Insult and Brand,” which is regularly spiced with righteous invective and epically eccentric descriptions. Mr. King characterizes the football gridiron “as a kind of heterotopic space, a zone of frivolity and liminality made possible by imagined indigenous masculinity that empowered white male athletes and a white patriarchal public sphere more generally.” One can imagine Mr. Ditka looking up from such a passage and exclaiming: “Where’s this guy from—outer space?” The passage illustrates another of Mr. King’s passions: clubbing the beneficiaries of “settler colonialism”—who, in pigment-talk, would be known as palefaces. Mr. King (whose jacket photo suggests his own membership in that tribe) writes of “unbearable whiteness” and “unacknowledged whiteness” and even their dull cousin “unremarkable whiteness.” He also sounds as if he’s not too keen on males. Those who defend the team name, he writes, reflect “the shape and significance of white masculinities in the wake of multiculturalism, feminism, and postindustrialization.” In the academic world that sort of sentence may be the equivalent of an 80-yard field goal—into the wind. Yet readers who might otherwise be willing to consider the argument for a name change may eventually conclude that Mr. King sounds a lot like the headmaster at a re-education camp, one who perhaps types with one hand and sharpens a machete with the other. If he’s for something, there may be good reasons to take a generous look at the opposite side. When it comes to culture-war subjects, most of us have become accustomed to a fair amount of hectoring. Mr. King does show flashes of genius in that regard, delivering his diatribes with startling intensity and an imaginative deployment of cultural-theory jargon. Even so, we might be forgiven for not getting too worked up about Indian mascots or, for that matter, teams whose names and logos exploit wild animals, pirates, giants or the vast inanimate heat. We would find ourselves in good company. A 2003-04 Annenberg survey found that only 9% of Native Americans felt the Redskins name to be offensive. Mr. King concedes that later polls “have shown support for the team name among Native Americans.” It is worth remembering that a slur can lose its sting, just as the F-word—once the hydrogen bomb of obscenities—is now as common in everyday conversation as asking, “How’s your mother?” In fact, more common. That doesn’t mean that the Redskins name won’t someday change. A new stadium deal might include a push for revision. New owners could insist on a new identity. A decline in merchandise sales might doom the tradition. So it’s not too early to suggest replacements. One assumes that Mr. Trump would support the Washington Bloviators, while anti-Washington types might prefer the Satraps or (my choice) the Burons—a pleasing contraction of “bureaucrat” and “moron.” Meantime, several solid reasons not to support the team remain in play: high ticket and beer prices, traffic jams, and a very good chance, on any given Sunday, that you’ll see an alternate version of Little Big Horn, this time with the Indians getting the short end of the stick.
