A Washington Football Fan Breaks With Tradition I am a third-generation fan of the professional football team in Washington. When my family sat down for pancakes last weekend, with a big game against Washington's archrival, Dallas, looming on the eve of Columbus Day, I had to tell my children why we were not going to use the team's nickname anymore. It wasn't an easy decision, though perhaps it should have been. I had the good fortune to be 6 - a prime year for wide-eyed sports fandom - in the inner-ring suburbs of Washington when Joe Gibbs arrived as coach to deliver a glorious run in the 1980s. Sometimes, we just called the team Washington, using the same shorthand favored by foreign correspondents describing governments. Same logic, too: other than the most important entity in town, what could you possibly mean? On Sunday afternoons, our family would gather at my grandparents" house in Forestville, Md. We'd sip Cokes. We'd eat meatballs in ketchup sauce. At halftime, we'd take squirt guns outside, waiting less than patiently for Grandpa to toss down his cigarette butt. And at every touchdown, we'd raise our voices in song. Fight on, fight on, till you have won Sons of Waaah-shing-ton Rah! In the last days of his life, Grandpa told my younger brother to "always cheer for the Redskins." He knew we needed no such encouragement. It was just a way for a complicated man with a simple heart, a World War II veteran on his way out of a changed world, to connect with an uncomprehending grandson in the last few moments they would have to share. By that point, fandom had claimed a substantial portion of my brother's identity, and mine. Twice every afternoon, with one set of friends on the blacktop parking lot at school and later with the neighborhood boys in somebody's backyard, we'd choose players to impersonate in our games. I always wanted to be Darrell Green, the cornerback with such quickness that he could give his man a lead only to lull the opposing quarterback into an interception. My exuberance peaked on Jan. 31, 1988, when Doug Williams became the first (and only) black starting quarterback to win the Super Bowl. Even without knowing Washington's shameful history as the last team to integrate black players, I remember understanding that something momentous had just gone down. Later that year, a job opportunity took our family to, of all places, Dallas. I was a total brat about it, perceiving some sort of cosmic insult added to injury. I spent that summer trying to lift weights in preparation for my first day as the new kid in a school full of Cowboys fans. One day, a well-meaning man in the gym pointed out my T-shirt, which read, "My two favorite teams are the Washington Redskins and whoever is playing the Cowboys." He said, "I bet your friends give you a hard time about that shirt." I said, "I don't have any friends." Later, as our family spread across the continent, the team remained our truest conversational lubricant. Last year, we traded calls about the most exciting season in, well, a generation. For the climactic game against Dallas, my brother and I had our young children together with their grandparents, all decked out in burgundy and gold. Now, partly because of that success, the Oneida Indian Nation has reinvigorated the call to change the team's nickname. President Obama and even Bob Costas have added their voices. The team's owner, Daniel Snyder, has softened his position, or at least his presentation. All sides have commissioned polls. And last week, a political cartoonist depicted the team logo alongside a swastika. It's not a real debate in this country, I suppose, until somebody likens an ideological opponent to a Nazi. The name's defenders, including my brother, ask: Who gets to claim offense? Must we bow to every hypersensitivity? But when my family sat down to breakfast in our team T-shirts, on a holiday weekend celebrating the white man whose ignorance relegated the continent's many tribes to the collective misnomer Indians, I could not bring myself to blithely pass along this one piece of our tradition. Forget for a minute all the other problems with football, a sport proven to cause grievous injury, irreversible brain damage and violent death. Forget, too, how silly it seems that grown men should run around calling themselves by names fit for the childhood world of make-believe: Giants, Cowboys, Eagles. When people tell you they are offended by a word describing an ethnic group, they do not have to prove it. You have the right to continue using that word. But then you are responsible for understanding the consequences of shifting from unintentionally to intentionally giving offense. I'm not happy about this. But the value of my nostalgia has a limit. Knowingly asking my children to embrace a racial slur crosses that line. Our family tradition will thrive in a new light, I hope. Call the football team by the city name, as some soccer clubs do. Put it on a T-shirt. I'll buy five. And when the next game against Dallas kicks off in December, I'll dress my children in burgundy and gold, ready to enjoy one of the greatest rivalries in sport. I'll be cheering for Washington. Michael Brick, a former New York Times reporter, is the author of "Saving the School: The True Story of a Principal, a Teacher, a Coach, a Bunch of Kids, and a Year in the Crosshairs of Education Reform."