A 60-second version of the above advertisement, produced by the National Congress of American Indians, will air in six cities during the NBA Finals on the evening of June 10. California's Yoca Dehe Wintun Nation is primarily footing the bill.
The controversy over the name of Washington, DC's football team has raged for years but it's intensified recently in the wake of a number of controversies about race in sports. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has begun to champion the cause of getting the team to change its offensive name:
Conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer has also denounced the name.
And though congressional action against the team and its owner, Dan Snyder, is unlikely it is possible. Activist Susan Shown Harjo is part of a litigation effort that wants to get federal courts to declare the team's intellectual property — copyrights and trademarks to be voided and unenforceable. Most experts regard this as a longshot, legally speaking. But Congress could amend the laws currently on the books to clarify that names and logos grounded in racial slurs are not valid intellectual property. If that happened, Snyder would have essentially no choice but to change the team's name.
