As widely reported, President Donald J. Trump dumped Indigenous Peoples’ Day, only releasing a proclamation that October 13, 2025, be celebrated as Columbus Day.
It’s a wonder Trump didn’t demand the Washington Commanders revert their name to the Washington Redskins for today’s Monday Night Football game.
Chief Zee is spinning in his grave for sure.
MultiCultClassics is often occupied with real work. As a result, a handful of events occur without the expected blog commentary. This limited series—Delayed WTF—seeks to make belated amends for the absence of malice.
In December 2024, Newsweek reported the Washington Commanders are considering changing the team’s name back to the Washington Redskins.
If it comes to fruition, expect a celebratory breakfast with Aunt Jemima pancakes and Rastus-rebranded Cream of Wheat—in addition to plenty of Land O’Lakes butter featuring the Native American maiden mascot.
MultiCultClassics recommends team officials halt any renaming announcements for the time being, as the Commanders’ playoff progress could be thwarted by Offensive Karma.
Indeed, the team’s decisively dominating win over the Detroit Lions proves the revised name re-energized the franchise—along with new ownership including NBA Legend Magic Johnson. Spirited players—led by breakthrough Quarterback Jayden Daniels—have established the Commanders as championship contenders.
Cultural competence and diversity lead to victory.
Washington Commanders Rumored to Change Their Name Back to Redskins
The NFL’s Redskins became the Washington Football Team in 2020, then the Commanders in 2022, but the team may return to the identity it previously held for 87 years.
Commanders owner Josh Harris has expressed support for a name reversal since he took over the team last year. Harris and NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell visited Capitol Hill on Monday to lobby for a bill that would help revitalize Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Stadium. A senior Senate staffer told Newsweek that U.S. Republican Senator John Thune of South Dakota was among the lawmakers who met with Harris and Goodell.
Newsweek reached out to the NFL and Harris’ representatives for comment Tuesday morning.
The Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources recently passed the D.C. Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Stadium Campus Revitalization Act, which would transfer the land with the former stadium and its vicinity to the D.C. government for up to 99 years. The bill now moves to the Senate floor for a full vote.
There is no guarantee that the Commanders would build their next stadium at the site, but it’s possible that the football team returns to its home from 1961 to 1996.
A name reversal would be “a win against this woke mindset / sensitivity we’ve seen the last couple of years,” conservative influencer Amir Odom told Newsweek.
“Why are we politicizing sports team names?” he asked. “There’s more to worry about in this country than grown men fondling balls on a field and what name we refer to them as.”
“Let’s let this be a cultural and community thing. It’s one thing for politicians to share their opinion but to get this involved is a bit much.”
Is the Redskins Name Coming Back?
Harris, who bought the football team from longtime owner Dan Snyder last year for $6.05 billion, had previously said the old Redskins name, originating in 1933, would not return.
But Harris’ group includes NBA legend Magic Johnson, who told NBC News otherwise.
“Everything’s on the table, especially after this year,” Johnson told journalist Craig Melvin last year. “We’ll see where we are with the name.”
Some fans have even urged President-elect Donald Trump to change the team’s name back when he returns to office.
Do Native Americans Want the Redskins Name Back?
In September, ML Football, the credentialed media for everything football related, announced that the family of the Blackfeet chief featured in the logo wants the team to change its name back to Redskins.
“90 percent of Native Americans supported the Redskins name,” the post reads.
“People are fed up with everything being offensive,” Odom said. “If they change the name back it’s definitely a cultural win for keeping things how they are no matter the origin since context has changed. I feel like this could be a nod to keeping historic statues up despite the origins.”
Why Did the Washington Redskins Change Their Name?
“Redskin” is sometimes used as a discriminatory slang term against Indigenous people in the United States.
Amid the Black Lives Matter protests that followed the death of George Floyd, Snyder faced growing pressure from sponsors, including Nike, FedEx and PepsiCo, to change the team’s name. The league and team announced in July 2020 that it was “undergoing a thorough review of the team name.”
Snyder had insisted for over two decades, however, that he was not going to abandon the Redskins name, even as Indigenous advocacy groups fought to get rid of it. In 2020, more than a dozen tribal leaders and organizations sent a letter to Goodell calling for the league to force Snyder into changing the team’s name.
Criticism surrounding the name started in the 1960s and gained larger public traction in the 1990s. The team rebranded itself as the Washington Football Team in 2020 before becoming the Commanders in 2022.
But another name change could hurt the team, Jim Rocco, author of the coming book, Sports Crisis Communications: Cases & Controversies, told Newsweek.
“It’s always bad for a sports brand to sway this way and that in the face of changing political winds. You tend to make your fans dizzy,” he said. “In this case, the idea is actually a little crazy. What’s going to happen if the Democrats retake control of Congress? Will they change the name again?”
David Aaker, known as the “father of modern branding,” agreed that the team is in “a lose-lose situation.”
“Whatever route will upset some people and cause their support of the team to be reduced and that will not be offset by those that ‘won,’” Aaker told Newsweek. “If the name change is made I would not make a big deal out of it.”
Will the Original Redskins Logo Be Used?
Republican U.S. Senator Steve Daines of Montana previously threatened to block legislation pertaining to the RFK stadium site until the NFL and Commanders agreed to honor the old Redskins logo.
In a letter to Fox 5 WTTG, Daines said that the former logo, which depicted Blackfeet Chief Two Guns White Calf, acted as “a symbol of pride, strength and honor” and that it should not be censored.
The Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, which Daines leads, approved legislation last week that would fund revitalization of the D.C. football stadium site.
Who Is the Face of the Original Redskins Logo?
Daines told Newsweek he is now in favor of the bill because the Indigenous family credited with designing the original logo is now satisfied with the team’s efforts to honor Walter “Blackie” Wetzel’s work. There seems to be “good faith negotiations” with the league around the old logo. It is expected to be included on alumni shirts for those who played while sporting the Redskins logo.
“My goal has always been to support the Wetzel family and tribal stakeholders in their goal to bring the iconic Blackfeet logo back to a place of prominence,” Daines told Newsweek. “Native Americans in Montana have diverse views on the Redskins nickname but they overwhelmingly agree that the Blackfeet logo is a symbol of pride, strength and honor. I’ve insisted that the NFL, Commanders and their corporate sponsors celebrate it, not censor it.”
A Commanders team spokesperson on Monday told Newsweek that there are no plans to bring the logo back. It was developed in 1971 by Wetzel, a former leader of Blackfeet Nation. The Redskins image is a composite of Native American photographs, including one featuring a Blackfeet chief.
In Adland, Indigenous Peoples’ Day is essentially just another Monday—or the end of a holiday weekend for White advertising agencies acknowledging the occasion.
Yet unlike other special days, there are virtually no commemorative campaigns. No Land O’Lakes limited edition packages. No replica jerseys for the Washington Commanders or Cleveland Guardians. No Patrick DesJarlait tributes. No references to Iron Eyes Cody.
Indigenous people receive less than 0.3% of Adland’s attention today—and every day.
Based on this vintage advertisement, Washington has a history of utilizing questionable imagery of Native Americans.
Advertising Age reported the Washington Football Team—formerly known as the Washington Redskins—will become the Washington Commanders. Well, at least they voted against the Washington Comanches—and opted not to announce the new moniker during National Native American Heritage Month.
Washington Football Team Becomes The Washington Commanders
The team received more than 40,000 name suggestions from fans after axing its long-time ‘Redskins’ name in July 2020
By
The Washington Football Team, as the Washington, D.C.-based franchise has called itself since dropping its former “Redskins” moniker two years ago, today officially debuted a brand new identity: the Washington Commanders.
After months of speculation, the new name was confirmed this morning on social media, NBC’s “Today” show and at an event at FedEx Field, the Commanders’ home stadium. The club’s new look keeps the same burgundy and gold color scheme used by the Redskins for decades, but swaps the brand’s indigenous imagery for military-inspired flair, such as a band of stars.
The announcement closes a temporary, rumor-filled chapter of team history that had seen the Washington Football Team hint at its new identity for several months, including by releasing cropped images and teaser videos that gave fans a vague—but inconclusive—idea of what they could expect from the new look.
“As an organization, we are excited to rally and rise together as one under our new identity while paying homage to our local roots and what it means to represent the nation’s capital,” Dan Snyder, the team’s owner, said in a statement.
A year in the making
After initially refusing to consider any changes, the then-Washington Redskins made the call in July 2020 to abandon their long-controversial name amid mounting pressure and a wave of social justice protests in the U.S., with the team’s leadership committing to revamp its name and logo—both of which were considered by many to be offensive to Native Americans.
Last February, the 90-year-old team officially handed its rebrand duties to Stagwell Group’s Code and Theory, which was the incumbent agency that also crafted the franchise’s interim identity and its “No Name But Team” ad campaign that coincided with the NFL’s 2020-2021 season.
As part of the rebrand, the New York-based creative shop solicited public input for the franchise’s permanent identity, opening a “Brand Journey” webpage dedicated to the process that eventually received over 40,000 name and logo suggestions from fans.
Last summer, team CEO Tanya Snyder revealed on an ESPN podcast an unofficial shortlist of finalists that included the names Armada, Brigade, Defenders, Presidents and Red Hogs.
The new Commanders name “doesn’t seem to have a strong tie-back to the history for the franchise or the locale of the franchise, but I wouldn’t say it’s awful,” said Mike Carr, director and co-founder of branding firm NameStormers, which has helped develop names for clients including hard cider brand Angry Orchard and auto seller CarMax.
On the plus side, the revamped identity is uncontroversial and not politically incorrect—two major considerations for a team once decried as racist—and, importantly for Carr, it also follows two core principles of brand names: “It’s easy to say [and] it’s easy to spell,” he said.
Loose lips sink armadas
Despite earlier teasers—and assurance from the team’s president, James Wright, that additional names were still in play—the Washington Football Team appears to have gone to great lengths in recent months to conceal its new identity, which may have included using limited liability companies and registering in far-flung countries with obscure copyright databases.
It’s not an unheard-of step. In 2009, Apple filed its trademark application for “iPad” in Trinidad and Tobago with the owner listed as IP Application Development LLC, while Google originally filed the paperwork for its Pixel phones in Tonga. Even the Cleveland Guardians professional baseball team, formerly known as the Indians, filed in Mauritius before announcing its new name in July 2021.
But some keen sleuths seem to have predicted the existence of a “Washington Commanders” team in recent days.
Last week, a Twitter user by the name of Larry Legend mused that “commanders.com” had been transferred to MarkMonitor, a secure platform used by many NFL teams to manage their web domains. Joe Theismann, a former quarterback for the then-Redskins, also appeared to accidentally confirm the team’s adoption of the Commanders name in a CBS Sports Radio interview on Monday.
“I think the Commanders is a name that is going to be one that hopefully people like going forward,” said Theismann, who played for Washington in the 1970s and ’80s, noting that there are “a lot of commanders in Washington, D.C. and the Pentagon, and a lot of different branches of the service.”
“So to me, that’s the way I’m looking at it, as positions of leadership when it comes to the new name,” he continued, later suggesting to a Washington Times reporter that he had no advance knowledge of the new name.
Last night brought the most significant clue yet, when a local news helicopter making the rounds above FedEx Field—which is technically in Maryland, a few miles east of the nation’s capital—spotted a Washington Commanders banner inside the team store. Someone inside the shop allegedly dimmed the lights shortly after photos of the signage began circulating, making it harder to see, local media reported.
Unfortunately for Commanders fans, they’ll have to wait several months for the newly rebadged team to prove their mettle; while this year’s Super Bowl will see the Cincinnati Bengals take on the Los Angeles Rams on their home turf on Feb. 13, the Washington Football Team didn’t even make the playoffs this year, finishing the season with a paltry 7-10 record. It wasn't a shock for the team's longstanding fans. The Washington team, then the Redskins, last appeared in—and won—the Super Bowl in 1992.
Here’s a throwback of sorts. A Hartford Courant article in 1999 spotlighted brand images—including Aunt Jemima and sports mascots like the Washington Redskins—that were slow to evolve with the progress of society. Hey, it only took over 20 years after publication of the article for the corporations behind such culturally clueless characters to finally do the right thing.
When Brand Image Falls From Favor
By Matthew Kauffman, Courant Staff Writer
Think you’ve got a Y2K problem?
Sixty-four years ago, film mogul Darryl F. Zanuck put together a new studio and dubbed it 20th Century Fox. The name, christened with a modern tone, has since mellowed into solid nostalgia.
But come New Year’s Eve, it may sound nothing so much as old.
Fox says it has no plans to retire the venerable name. Still, at the Patent Office in Washington, D.C., take a guess who’s filed an application for the trademark “21st Century Fox.”
Fox’s dilemma points up the problem businesses face when their hard-built identities become dated or fall out of favor. Companies often spend years and millions building the value of their brands. But what is a company to do when its carefully crafted image begins to conjure the wrong image?
It’s enough to kill a brand. In the 1930s, pharmacists began selling an appetite suppressant called Ayds, which for a time was the top-selling weight-loss supplement.
And then the AIDS epidemic struck.
Sales plummeted, and within a few years, Ayds was off the market.
“There are just some things you can’t overcome,” said Ken Love, president and creative director of Lippincott & Margulies, a New York identity management firm.
So the Exxon Valdez oil tanker is now the SeaRiver Mediterranean.
Similarly, Valu-Jet jettisoned the name and repainted all of its planes after a disastrous 1996 crash in the Florida Everglades that killed 110 people. Goodbye, Valu-Jet. Hello, AirTran.
But experts in brand management say killing off a brand name—even one that’s tainted or dated—should be an option of last resort. The reason: In a crowded commercial marketplace, a familiar brand name can be a company’s most important selling asset.
“Brands help customers make decisions, and they’ve never been more important because the world is so confusing and cluttered,” said Allen Adamson, managing director of the New York office of Landor Associates, a brand-management company.
So companies such as Landor spend a lot of their time helping clients salvage a tainted or outdated image.
The chubby Campbell’s Soup Kids were hearty ambassadors for the company, but faced an image problem during the health-crazed 1980s. So Campbell’s kept them on the payroll, but put them on a crash diet.
Kentucky Fried Chicken may be the most famous six syllables in fast food, but as the chain grew, the company concluded that the name was too long, focused on too narrow a portion of the menu, and highlighted fried foods, which had fallen squarely out of favor. It might as well have been Kentucky Fat Chicken.
So the company capitalized on what Adamson calls the “FedEx Syndrome” and took a cue from consumers who were already abbreviating the restaurant as KFC.
“It really is the best of both worlds. The people who know and love us as Kentucky Fried Chicken still know and love us as Kentucky Fried Chicken,” said Michael Tierney, a spokesman for KFC. “But it also allows people to think more freely about our menu, and not just one part of the menu.”
KFC faced another challenge with the death of the company’s founder, “Colonel” Harland Sanders. Sanders died in 1980, and although his face remained on packaging, KFC had lost its most valuable spokesman.
So last year, the company debuted an animated Colonel, voiced by Randy Quaid. The new ad campaign preserves the familiar salesman—and adds hip-hop dance steps to project a more modern image than the elderly, white-suited Southerner.
That could easily project the wrong image, and companies often face their toughest challenges when they realize their icons are culturally offensive.
In the sports world, universities and professional teams have struggled for years over the fate of their often stereotypical Native American mascots. In the business world, some companies dumped offensive marketing symbols, such as the Frito Bandito, and others have been put through dramatic metamorphoses. And none was so dramatic as Aunt Jemima.
Aunt Jemima was created in 1889 as a classic Mammy figure, a crudely drawn, cartoonishly proportioned black woman with a rag tied around her head. According to the history created by the company, she was the revered cook on the plantation of a fictitious Colonel Higbee. Revered throughout the South for her skills in the kitchen, Aunt Jemima, the story went, had finally been persuaded to part with her top-secret recipes.
It may have been an early use of black people in American advertising, but this was a message aimed squarely at white people, and one that began to trouble consumers.
So in the 1950s, the company, owned by Quaker Oats, began slowly updating Aunt Jemima’s appearance until a dramatic makeover a decade ago remade her as a sweet, modern young grandmother. The head rag was gone, replaced by pearl earrings and a modern perm.
“As American culture has evolved, so has the trademark,” said Margaret Cohen, a spokeswoman for Quaker Oats.
The makeover preserved the familiar icon, but Love isn’t sure to what end.
“She has become so homogenized that I think she has lost all her character. I don’t know who she is,” he said. “It’s almost like they’re handling it like they’re embarrassed to have this brand.”
If not embarrassed, perhaps sensitive. Aunt Jemima is not marketed primarily to African American consumers, but since 1990, the company has sponsored an awards program honoring black female community leaders that is run by the National Council of Negro Women (which, incidentally, is one of a number of black organizations that have found themselves with out-of-date names. The most prominent of them, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, has resisted a name change in recognition of the organization’s powerful heritage. But the United Negro College Fund a few years ago began marketing itself as the College Fund/UNCF.)
Cohen said the sponsorship is part of the company’s long history of community support, particularly with programs aimed at women, the brand’s primary consumer.
Adamson said it is important to update images, but he said the original premise of the Aunt Jemima brand—that it was superior because it was the secret recipe of a black plantation cook—may no longer have any sales value.
“Sometimes, the distinction is no longer relevant, and you have to come to grips with that,” he said.
Adweek declared, “As Washington Renounces Native American Imagery, Pressure Continues on Remaining Teams.” Maybe the other teams should powwow on what to do.
Advertising Age reported the Washington Football Team hired the NFL’s first Chief Creative Officer. Chief?! Well, at least they didn’t go with “Redskin” Creative Officer…
Washington Football Team Hires First Chief Creative Officer Within NFL
Will Misselbrook will lead creative storytelling, digital sales and content monetization
By Jeanine Poggi
The Washington Football Team is bringing in what its says is the first chief creative and digital officer within the National Football League. The team named Will Misselbrook to the role on Tuesday, reporting directly to team President Jason Wright.
Misselbrook joins The Washington Football Team amid a massive rebrand of the franchise, which includes the selection of a new name and team identity. He will be charged with leading efforts around creative storytelling, digital sales and content monetization.
Washington dropped the long-controversial Redskins name and logo in July in the wake of social justice protests. In an effort to make fans part of the process, it has spent the past several months soliciting name suggestions and creative from fans, receiving nearly 40,000 submissions. It is chronicling the rebrand process on WashingtonJourney.com.
Misselbrook joins the team from The Wall Street Journal, where he served as global head of creative. He has also held roles at Wieden+Kennedy, Saatchi & Saatchi and BBH New York, as well as director of global creative content development for Coach in New York and head of creative content and branded entertainment for Condé Nast.
“The team did a fantastic job of creating access at a time when it was needed more than ever to bring fans into the gameday and football experiences online. We’ll look to extend that approach through more dynamic content and explore new, immersive opportunities to connect the team to the fanbase, partners, alumni, and our entire community,” Misselbrook said in a statement.
The team says Misselbook’s title is the first of its kind within an NFL front office, with no other team currently having a C-suite member dedicated to digital or creative disciplines.
In February, the Washington Football Team named Stagwell Group’s Code and Theory to lead the creative rebrand.
