Get me, talking about a sports thing...

Above: sports players playing
a sports game. Rugby, I believe.

I uh...look, understand that I'm not a sports...person. I've talked about this before, but the whole sports fandom thing exists for me in this weird alternate universe for which I have no context. From the outside it just seems like people arbitrarily choose some team to root for? Support? I don't know, but whatever it is it's like you just put on a hat or a jersey and then get really excited over the outcome of a game you have nothing to do with. Not you personally, just the general you.

Pictured: A helmet bearing the team
logo which is...wow...I mean, I know
they're changing it, but still. It's 2020...

Doesn't matter, all this is to say that I have no stake in sports whatsoever. But a subject having no bearing on one's life has never stopped anyone on the internet from having and also voicing an opinion that subject, so I'm going to chime in on this Washington D.C. football team thing. I don't care about sports and I don't live in Washington, but I, like a lot of people, have been rooting for (now I'm doing it) the people fighting to change the team's name from the incredibly offensive Washington Redskins to almost any other word in the English language. And good news: they won!

The team's owners announced recently that they'll be ditching the old name and considering alternatives with the help of "fans, business partners and alumni". In the meantime, effective yesterday, they'll be removing the previous team name and logo from everything and adopting the placeholder name:

Uh...well, it does what it says on the tin I suppose.

Most countries wouldn't put up statues to
the losers in the first place, but here we are.

Bland, sure, but it's not super-racist and that's a step in the right direction. The move comes at a time when, despite the American political right's best efforts, monuments to slavers and insurrectionists are coming down, Mississippi is changing its flag, military bases and even towns are being renamed, and maybe we, as a nation, are starting to acknowledge that maybe America has and has had a problem with racism? That maybe just maybe ignoring the centuries of injustice non-white people have endured doesn't do anything to address the underlining causes of-

-uh...I don't want to diminish the progress that dropping the old team name represents, even if the temporary name is a little m'eh, but didn't George Washington own a big planation full of enslaved people? Sure, he freed them (after he died), but still, he enslaved like a hundred and twenty three people and rented-yes, rented, dozens more. Not saying this isn't progress or that we need to go rename Washington D.C., but I don't know, maybe we aught to at least acknowledge the you know, the irony here?

Pictured: George Washington and some of the people he owned and forced to work for free...

(source: my liberal guilt, but also history)