Indians, Braves, Redskins all lose big on Indigenous Peoples' Day

Washington Redskins helmet.
(Image credit: Patrick Smith/Getty Images)

On Indigenous People's Day, all the sports teams still branded with racist caricatures of those people got walloped.

The Atlanta Braves, Cleveland Indians, and Washington Redskins all lost their games on the evening of the holiday originally named after the European explorer who stumbled upon the Americas and proceeded to enslave its inhabitants. And to be frank, those games weren't even close. In the Major League Baseball playoffs, Atlanta fell 6-2 to the Los Angeles Dodgers and Cleveland suffered a bruising 11-3 loss to the Houston Astros. Meanwhile on Monday Night Football, Washington was clobbered 43-19 by the New Orleans Saints.

Over the past few years, sports teams from high schools up to the professional leagues have moved to drop their racist names. These three teams have no public plans to change their names, but Cleveland recently pledged to stop using its Chief Wahoo logo in 2019. Still, the terribly racist mascot made one last appearance on Cleveland's uniforms:

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Adding insult to injury, both the Indians' and Braves' losses got them kicked out of the MLB postseason. Scratch that, the teams' racist names were insult enough.

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Kathryn Krawczyk

Kathryn is a graduate of Syracuse University, with degrees in magazine journalism and information technology, along with hours to earn another degree after working at SU's independent paper The Daily Orange. She's currently recovering from a horse addiction while living in New York City, and likes to share her extremely dry sense of humor on Twitter.