Adidas will pay for high schools to ditch offensive Native American mascots

On Thursday, Adidas announced it will help high school sports programs with Native American mascots and imagery transition to new, less offensive designs. And in case some schools are worried that it’ll be too expensive to make a redesign, the company will provide financial assistance as well:

adidas today announced it will lead a nationwide voluntary initiative for high schools who want to change mascot names and identities. adidas will offer its design resources to any high school in America that wants to change their logo or mascot from potentially harmful Native American imagery or symbolism. Additionally, the company will provide financial assistance to schools who want to change their identity to ensure the transition is not cost prohibitive.

Adidas confirmed the announcement to the public in a tweet, which starts with a sentence that basically illustrates why they want to do this:

The debate over Native American imagery in sports has been going on for a long time. It’s not just Washington’s NFL team and their “Redskins” trademark that moved Adidas to start this initiative, although their situation definitely magnified the debate.

Washington released a statement to SB Nation concerning Adidas.

The hypocrisy of changing names at the high school level of play and continuing to profit off of professional like-named teams is absurd. Adidas make hundreds of millions of dollars selling uniforms to teams like the Chicago Blackhawks and the Golden State Warriors, while profiting off sales of fan apparel for the Cleveland Indians, Florida State Seminoles, Atlanta Braves and many other like-named teams. It seems safe to say that Adidas’ next targets will be the biggest sports teams in the country, which won’t be very popular with their shareholders, team fans, or partner schools and organizations.