The "R" word: Dave Zirin's open letter to Dan Snyder.
Small victories, adding up to larger ones. Sometimes it would be nice to win bigger victories. Other times, you just read the damned dictionary and find the answer.
Of course, you gotta wanna read.
A Judge Just Ruled Against the Most Racist Name in Football, by Dave Zirin (The Nation)
The Washington football team's name is a dictionary-defined slur—and now the federal Patent and Trademark Office has been ordered to cancel its trademark registration ...
... The Confederate Flag is, as we have written about before, connected with iron chains to the logo of the Washington football team, and just as the flag is being denied official sanction over state houses of the South, the football logo was dealt a devastating blow on Wednesday. Judge Gerald Bruce Lee, in strikingly definitive terms, affirmed a previous ruling and ordered the federal Patent and Trademark Office to cancel the team’s trademark registration. Judge Lee wrote in his 70-page decision that the name meets the “legal standard” for defamation in that it “may disparage” a substantial part of the Native American community. In proving that the name met this standard, Judge Lee did not reference academic texts or polls or the decades of activism by Native Americans to get the name changed. Instead he referenced a radical text otherwise known as “a dictionary.” Sincerely. Judge Lee ruled that since the name is a dictionary-defined slur, arguing that it is not a slur, as team owner Dan Snyder continues to do, is absurd.
