The Supreme Court Just Made A Washington ‘Redskins’ Name Change Much Less Likely
The NFL franchise in Washington, D.C., received a major boost in its fight to save its controversial “Redskins” name Monday morning, thanks to a Supreme Court ruling in a separate legal dispute.
At issue is the team’s federal trademark protections for the nickname, which Native American activists have described as a “dictionary-defined racial slur.” The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office’s Trademark Trial and Appeal Board invalidated those trademark protections in 2014, ruling that the name was “disparaging to Native Americans” and thus violated a clause in a federal trademark law.
The ruling is another major setback for Native Americans who have fought to change the team’s name for nearly 50 years. After years of protesting and asking the team’s owners to change the name, the activists began targeting the trademark protections in 1992, under the view that the anti-disparagement clause provided a leverage point against the nickname.
The Supreme Court, however, struck down that clause Monday, ruling that the law’s prohibition on providing federal trademarks for disparaging terms or logos violated the First Amendment’s free speech protections.
posted
Is it that colonialism by Europeans renders local peoples psychologically paralyzed. The Native Americans have inherited a set of nations within the continental U.S. The Navajo nation is more than 3 times the size of Israel and should be the basis for an independent nation with the promise of being an industrial power like Taiwan, Hong Kong, Malaysia or Singapore. The question--applicable to all peoples impacted on by Europeans--is why aren't they more proactive--in terms of modernization?
"Red Skin" signifies only the color of the skin the European settlers saw the locals as having. Is that any different from calling someone "black" or "white"? Somehow "yellow" has not stuck on the people of China--except in the derogatory phrase "yellow peril".
Point being that "let the liberal whites argue over terms like 'Redskins'". More important business to settle.
Posts: 5492 | Registered: Nov 2004
| IP: Logged |
UBBFriend: Email this page to someone!
Printer-friendly view of this topic