SUBSCRIBER-ONLY NEWSLETTER
By John McWhorter
Opinion Writer
On Sunday, President Trump, still on the ropes because of the controversy over the government’s Jeffrey Epstein files, ventured a distraction. With all the usual exclamation points and eccentric capitalization, he sounded the alarm on an issue a reader might have mistaken for a national crisis: the names of professional sports franchises. In particular those franchises that had cast off names that no longer felt culturally appropriate: the Washington Commanders, formerly the Redskins, and the Cleveland Guardians, formerly the Indians.
“The Washington ‘Whatever’s’ should IMMEDIATELY change their name back to the Washington Redskins Football Team. There is a big clamoring for this. Likewise, the Cleveland Indians, one of the six original baseball teams,” — by the way, it wasn’t — “with a storied past. Our great Indian people, in massive numbers, want this to happen. Their heritage and prestige is systematically being taken away from them.”
