On a Saturday night in New York, the sports world vilifies Serena Williams for raining threats upon a line judge.
Yet a day later across the river, the same sports world celebrates a team whose nickname is considered a threat to an entire ethnic group.
Redskins.
A pro football season begins with two noted players banished to the sidelines for "conduct detrimental to the integrity of, and confidence in, the National Football League."
Yet that same league supports a team whose entire identity is forged through a symbol of detrimental conduct known as racism.
Redskins.
It remains one of the great mysteries in sports, a 77-year-old crime that remains largely ignored and purposely unsolved.
How does a team from the nation's capital, supported by a fan base of some of the nation's greatest thinkers, maintain a nickname that is the Native American equivalent to the N-word?
Redskins?
"It is the worst thing in the English language you can be called if you are a native person," said Suzan Shown Harjo, a Native American writer and public policy advocate who is the lead plaintiff in one of the most compelling lawsuits in sports history.
Seventeen years after challenging the Washington Redskins trademark, Harjo and six others have renewed their fight, petitioning the Supreme Court to examine a lower-court ruling that denied their challenge on a technicality.
It was announced Monday that Harjo's group will appeal the decision that their challenge was made too late and falls outside the statute of limitations.
The Redskins, named in 1933, were registered as a trademark during a vastly different racial climate in 1967.
Harjo's group challenges that, now and then, the trademark violates the Lanham Act, which bars trademarks that "disparage" people living or dead.
She's on time. Of the several high-profile Native American nicknames still alive in sports, nothing is more clearly disparaging than this one.
While the Braves, Indians, Chiefs and Blackhawks all describe a group of people, the Redskin is the clear slur of an individual.
Look it up. It is listed as "offensive" in most dictionaries, and as the name given an Indian hunter's bounty in several historical publications.
"It is basically characterizing a person by their skin," Harjo said. "How wrong is that?"
