(AP) — President Donald Trump is threatening to hold up a new stadium deal if Washington’s NFL team did not restore its name to a racial slur, despite decades of psychological research showing the negative mental health impacts of Native American mascots.

The president is demanding a private company change its name to something that researchers have linked to a variety of negative mental health outcomes, particularly for children, said Mark Macarro, president of the National Congress of American Indians. The organization has been pushing back on stereotypes of Native Americans since the 1950s, including Native sports mascots.

“This is a big reminder with this administration that we’re going to take some backward steps,” Macarro said. “We have our studies, we have our receipts, and we can demonstrate that this causes real harm.”

More than two decades of research on Native mascots have shown they lead to heightened rates of depression, self-harm, substance abuse and suicidal ideation among Indigenous peoples, and those impacts are the greatest on children. Citing this data, the American Psychological Association has been recommending the retirement of Native mascots since 2001.

The president believes that franchises who changed their names to “pander to the Woke Left” should immediately restore their original names,” White House spokesperson Davis Ingle said in a statement to The Associated Press.

“Thanks to President Trump, the days of political correctness and cancel culture are over,” he said.

Some teams change names while others resist

Under pressure from decades of activism, the Washington Redskins — a racial slur and arguably the most egregious example — retired the name in 2020, eventually settling on the Commanders. Later that year, the Cleveland Indians changed its name to the Guardians.

Two major league teams, the NFL’s Kansas City Chiefs and the NHL’s Chicago Blackhawks, continue to resist calls to change their names. The Chiefs have banned fans from wearing headdresses or face paint meant to depict Native Americans at games but has resisted prohibiting the use of the “tomahawk chop”, which critics have long called derogatory.

More than 1,500 grade schools across the country — a decrease over the past few years — still use Native mascots, according to the National Congress of American Indians, using names like “Savages” as well as the slur that Trump aims to bring back to the Washington team.

Experts say Native mascots reinforce racial

bias

Native American people, activists, and leaders have been asking for the retirement of Native mascots for generations. Popular arguments defending the mascots have been that they “honor” Native people or that it simply boiled down to people being “offended,” said Steph Cross, a professor of psychology and researcher at the University of Oklahoma and a citizen of the Comanche Nation. But now we have decades of data that agrees on the negative mental health impacts, she said.

“Being offended is not even really the problem. That’s a symptom,” Cross said.

She noted that Native mascots aren’t just harmful to Indigenous peoples, they also reinforce racial prejudices among non-Natives, including people who will work directly with Native people like health care professionals and teachers.

“I think about these people who are going to be working with Native children, whether they realize that or not, and how they may unintentionally have these biases,” Cross said.

Stephanie Fryberg, a professor at Northwestern University, who is a member of the Tulalip Tribes and one of the country’s leading researchers on Native mascots, said, “The ultimate impact, whether conscious or unconscious, is bias in American society.”

Her work has also shown Native mascots increase the risk of real psychological harm, especially for young Native people.

“Honoring Native peoples means ending dehumanization in both imagery and policy,” she said.