For decades now, there’s been an ongoing debate about whether or not the Washington Redkins should change their name. This controversy has reached a fever pitch as of late, and there’s mounting pressure on Washington owner Daniel Snyder to do something about it.
One person who has an idea for change is Republican Presidential candidate Jeb Bush. Bush is actually in favor of changing the name of the team, or at least the part that we didn’t expect to see changed:
And someone sent me an e-mail and said ‘Jeb, the term Redskins isn’t the pejorative; it’s Washington that’s the pejorative.’ If they’re going to change their name, I don’t know what you’d call it, Northern Virginia Redskins or something like that.”
There are a couple of problems with this. First off, the team plays in Maryland and secondly, I’m pretty sure that the vast majority of people who are interested in this subject are pretty okay with the city of Washington, D.C. as a geographical entity. The term “Washington” won’t be used as a racial slur anytime soon, since geographical locations are pretty hard to be used as slurs.
So, I’d say that the chances of this particular name change going through are about as likely as Jeb Bush’s current chances are of reaching the White House at this point.