I’ll start right out by stating the obvious: This is not going to be an objective post. I hate professional sports. Ergo, I hate football. I find it deplorable that more people in this country can name the starting line-up of their favorite sports team than can name their senators or representatives. The latter are people who have a real and significant impact on the lives of every American, whereas the former are just people trying to make as many bucks as they can before they blow out a knee and have to go on to doing commentary or hawking projection screen TVs during Rhonda Shear’s Up All Night. Or something like that…

My hatred for football, however, is even deeper based on the fact that I live in the D.C. metropolitan area. Therefore, each football season I’m subjected to constant yammering about the Redskins. And each year I wonder if this is going to be the year that TPTB finally make a long-overdue decision. What decision? To stop calling the football team of the nation’s effing capital city one of the most racist names still in use by any sports team in any league.

Seriously, are we really living in the 21st century? Or are we still living in a time when it was cool to have Uncle Remus tell us about his syrup, “dis sho’ am good!”

I’d argue that even that is less offensive than calling D.C.’s home team a name that American Indians have repeatedly said is as offensive to them as “the N word” is to Black people. Yet the Indian groups are continuously ignored or overruled while “the N word” has been given so much power that even the implication of its use can ruin a person. Don’t believe me? Ask David Howard, one of former D.C. Mayor Anthony Williams’ top aides, who resigned his post due to community protest after a coworker heard him use the word “niggardly” in a conversation and accused him of using a racial epithet.

So why do we continue to have a team with an actual epithet for a name? I’ll give you one guess. It’s long and green and while it’s not Kermit’s finger, lots of people still get off on it. Yes! Yes! YES!! That’s right…it’s the Almighty Dollar!!

So stated Redskins attorney Bob Raskopf this past May, in response to the U.S. Court of Appeals ruling in favor of the Redskins keeping their name. Raskopf put it in clear enough terms by pointing out that “millions have been spent on the Redskins brand and the team would have suffered great economic loss if they lost the trademark registrations.”

“Great economic loss.”

I Googled “most profitable professional football teams” and I found two lists, one from 2003 and one from 2007, that listed the Redskins in the number 1 or 2 spots of the professional football teams in this country making the most profits. The 2007 report showed that the Redskins team value exceeded $1 billion that season.

Why, then, would Redskins owner Dan Snyder choose to waste any of those profits by doing something that would only appease the laments of less than one percent of the U.S. population? It’s not like American Indians have been getting the shaft by this country on anything else.

So hail to the Redskins. May they never win another Super Bowl until they fix what they should have fixed a long time ago.

Losers.