I have watched with interest as the brouhaha over the Washingon Redskins team name as it spilled over from our nation’s capital to the deepest backwaters of Red and Blue America. And I admit to being puzzled. After all, as Redskins owner, Daniel Snyder says of the name, “It represents honor, it represents pride, it represents respect.”

It is hard to disagree. Few people have a greater sense of racial sensitivity than a man who once threatened a lawsuit against a local weekly, the Washington City Paper, saying that a cover photograph of him bedecked with graffiti-like scribblings of a devil’s horns and a moustache and beard was an anti-semitic slur.

But what I don’t understand is why Mr. Snyder, with his finely tuned sense of racial outrage, lets such an inaccurate representation of his team’s racial makeup be so blatantly promoted. I looked closely at team photos and saw no one with what I would call red skin. There were, to be sure, some rather ruddy fellows, especially the beefy offensive linemen, but that seemed to be more an issue of blood pressure or some other medical condition than actual skin tone.