Luis Alvarez
Op-Ed

The Washington Redskins have been a team in the National Football League since the early 1930’s. They have won championships and have brought our attention to successful players such as Joe Theismann, Santana Moss, Joe Gibbs and recent Baylor graduate Robert Griffin III. I have watched them my entire life as my family is a die-hard Dallas Cowboy fan and the two teams are in the same division so they play each other twice every year. I have never thought the name “Redskin” was considered racist until lately jumping into the news. Recently, in a legal challenge that has been going on for a couple of decades now, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office cancelled the trademark status for the teams name and their logo, stating that it is an ethic slur disparaging to Native Americans. Some Native Americans do not oppose of the name and logo, being in the 21st century, but a great portion of them do which makes the term problematic. Native Americans have been asking Washington to change the name and the logo since the 1960s, yet nothing has changed. So with the cancellation of the trademark status by the U.S. patent office, this currently does not mean much. In 1992, the team lost a similar challenge but eventually prevailed. If the owner of the redskins, Dan Snyder, wanted to change the name or the logo, he would have been able to do so a long time ago and this is where I see the problem. Are people starting to compare Dan Snyder to Donald Sterling because