The Washington Redskins' fate is now in the hands of the Supreme Court

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(Image credit: Hannah Foslien/Getty Images)

The Supreme Court on Wednesday began hearing oral arguments for Lee v. Tam, an intellectual property case challenging a 71-year-old federal ban on "disparaging" trademarks. Immediately at issue is a Portland dance-rock band called The Slants, but how the case is decided is expected to have broader implications — including for the Washington Redskins.

The Slants' band members are Asian-American, and they wanted to trademark the name as a way to reclaim the slur. "I thought that was interesting," band member Simon Tam told The New York Times, because "we can talk about our slant on life on what it's like to be people of color." Tam grew up listening to bands that similarly took stigmatizing labels "and flip these assumptions on their heads." So when his trademark application got rejected, he assumed it was a paperwork error — until he noticed the rejection reason given was that the name is "disparaging to persons of Asian ethnicity." "Well, do they know we're of Asian descent?" Tam wondered.

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Bonnie Kristian

Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.