From The Atlantic
By Geoffrey Nunberg
The thing to bear in mind about the Redskins trademark case is that it was basically about the ‘60s—and the ‘60s of Mad Men, not Woodstock.
Whatever the connotations of “redskin” now, the question facing the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board was whether it was disparaging when the team first registered it as a trademark in 1967. If that was so, the registration would have fallen afoul of the provision of the Lanham Act that disallows the registration of trademarks that may disparage the members of a group. You have the right to pick a slur for your product name, the thinking goes, but you can’t expect the government to protect your exclusive use of it by restricting the speech of others....
Since the mid-19th century “redskin” has simply been the slang word the white man used for the Indian, and like all slang words, it was infused with the attitudes about the thing it names. In the passages from books and newspapers and the movie clips we provided the court to document the word’s history, the word is inevitably associated with contempt, derision, condescension, or sentimental paeans to the noble savage. It couldn’t have been otherwise—what other attitudes were out there?...