Interested: How Susan S. White, Shareholder Advocacy, and 50 Years of Indigenous Activism Changed the Game and the Name of the Washington Football Team

Abstract

This qualitative, descriptive case study utilized oral history informed by Indigenous research methodologies to explore how Susan White (Oneida of Wisconsin, 1963-2018) led an intertribal coalition of asset managers to address the problem of convincing the Washington, DC, NFL team to abandon their racist former name and mascot. I describe the shareholder advocacy process in that social movement and the confluence of factors that may have enabled the effectiveness of that tactic. Black-led movements generated opportunities at both the start and end of this movement. Indigenous activists utilized a range of tactics over the decades to pressure the team. Public opinion responded to the two trademark lawsuits (one plaintiff, Norbert Hill, Jr., is a narrator in this project). In 2020, the visibility of Black Lives Matter peaked after George Floyd was lynched. Other movements also gained widespread support. Over decades, Susan built relationships, establishing a coalition of socially responsible investment (SRI) leaders that continues to support Indigenous-led initiatives, including name change movements, today. This study finds that her determination, engagement, motivation, and perseverance enabled the movement's outcome. The popularity of corporate anti-racism in summer 2020 was an opportune moment for re-engagement; then, the partnerships she had created enabled the coalition's quick response. This dissertation discusses the dependence of white heteropatriarchal masculine identity formation on stereotyped representations of Black and Indigenous masculinity. Gridiron (or American) football fandom can provide a sense of community and belonging that were lost in the invention of whiteness itself—and thus can also become a space for performing white supremacist capitalist heteropatriarchy. Challenging the usage of Indigenous mascots promotes Indigenous self-determination and resists genocide. It also achieves those goals simply by virtue of the impacts of any social movement, which is inherently successful for those who participate in it, witness it, and/or learn of it. This project intervenes in the common assumption that the U.S. Black civil rights movement was the inspiration that sparked Indigenous activism in the 1970s. While the Black Panther Party and the American Indian Movement (AIM) did offer support to each other, both started locally based on observed local needs. Likewise, Susan’s work was part of the Oneida Nation’s larger financial and cultural reclamation and revitalization projects for sovereignty and survivance. One significant factor in this story is this use of shareholder advocacy, a form of activist investing, to effect cultural change, rather than the more typical profit motive. Its history reveals that socially motivated investing is not just a recent offshoot of profit-motivated activist investing, but rather, its own form of activist investing. Another factor is the movement’s target: a privately-owned corporation. The coalition instead targeted its publicly-traded sponsors, FedEx, Nike, and PepsiCo. A further feature is the activists’ decision to invest rather than divest or boycott. They made a conscious, strategic decision to not only participate in capitalism, but also to exploit it for their own particular ends. This case study supports the claim that long-term, coalitional movements can achieve their stated goal(s). The outcome of this movement is a testament to the power of Indigenous activism, and its success strengthens ongoing Indigenous movements and shareholder advocacy work.