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After decades of controversy, it took a serious threat to Dan Snyder’s team’s finances, and those of the rest of the N.F.L., to get the owner of the Washington Redskins to consider changing the team’s name, which Native Americans (and many dictionaries) consider to be a slur.
The final straw? FedEx, which pays about $8 million a year for the naming rights to the team’s stadium in Landover, Md., and whose chairman has been trying to sell his shares in the team, said that it would back out of the deal if the name was not changed in a letter that The New York Times was allowed to review.