Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wants the Washington Redskins to change their name after their “blackout post” on Tuesday. The Redskins tweeted out “BlackoutTuesday to stand in solidarity of George Floyd who died in police custody in Minneapolis on Memorial Day.
Ocasio-Cortez, who represents New York, made it clear that if the Redskins were really for social justice, they would change the name Redskins.
“Want to really stand for racial justice? Change your name,” Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wrote on Twitter.
Want to really stand for racial justice? Change your name. https://t.co/XTlIJrfNx4
— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) June 2, 2020
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez isn’t the first to demand this. According to a timeline posted by the Washington Post, people started pushing for the Redskins to change their name all the way back in the 1970’s. It died down a bit, but in 1992, everything started to pick up steam again. Before the Redskins played in Super Bowl XXVI, 3,000 demonstrators marched in hopes to get the Redskins to change their name.
Many teams across major sports have changed their names, but the Redskins have stood firm and made it clear they have no intention of changing the name. Even Barack Obama said back in 2013 that he would strongly consider changing the name of the team if he was the owner.
“If I were the owner of the team and I knew that there was a name of my team—even if it had a storied history—that was offending a sizeable group of people, I’d think about changing it,” Obama said via Newsweek.
There are many more who will probably push for the Redskins to change their team name, but until there is a court order that says they must, Dan Snyder will probably continue to stand up the Redskins name. Time will tell if Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez lending her name to this has any change on how the franchise approaches things.
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