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Photo courtesy Jacqueline Keeler

Simon Tam, of the band The Slants, said it's racist toward Asians that white people have been the only ones
who have been granted federal trademarks for the word 'chink.'
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STORY PRINT ThePRINT
Slants’ Simon Tam:
Like You and 227 others like this.
‘Courts Hijacked My Case’ April 11, 2016
JACQUELINE KEELER 1/4/16 Kentucky Forward
Derek...
After playing just
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“I’ve been a long-time supporter of the
Change the Name campaign,” said April 07, 2016

Simon Tam of Asian-American band Bomani Jones

Mocks Chief...
The Slants, fresh off a major legal Bomani Jones’s T-
victory in his fight to trademark his shirt caused quite a...
group’s name. Tam is referring to
GET NEWS ALERTS various grass-roots efforts to change April 06, 2016
Cleveland Bans
the racist name of the Washington Baseball...
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football team, a cause that may be On Monday, the day
negatively impacted by the same ruling of the Cleveland...
that benefited Tam.

“I realize that in the rush to break the story a lot of misinformation has been
shared by the media,” he said.

On December 22, 2015, the Washington NFL team appeared to get an early
Christmas present. In the case In re Tam, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the
Federal Circuit ruled 9 to 3 that the Trademark Office cannot deny registration of
a trademark even if it is considered derogatory. Headlines in the press
announcing the ruling invariably linked The Slants’ case as helping billionaire
Dan Snyder’s football franchise to regain cancelled trademark registrations for the
ethnic slur “Redskins.”

Shortly after the ruling was made, Tam agreed to an interview with Indian
Country Today Media Network to share his perspective and his solidarity with the
Native American community, and how he feels about the decision potentially
helping the upcoming appeal by the Washington Redskins, Pro Football, Inc. Vs
Blackhorse et. al.

Read the full interview.

In the full-length Q&A, Tam recounted the practical and legal steps his band took
to register a trademark for its name during what came to be a six-year struggle.

“Major labels will not work with an artist if you can’t protect your creative works
and licensing,” said the self-described “racial and social justice” advocate. “We got
a rejection letter from USPTO because our name was disparaging to people of
Asian descent.”

The Trademark Office’s rejection quoted UrbanDictionary.com, a crowd-sourced

online dictionary of slang words and phrases that is a parody of Dictionary.com,
and included a photo of white pop star Miley Cyrus pulling her eyes back.

Tam and his attorney addressed the USPTO’s logic based on the argument that
the band’s use of the term “slants” amounted to re-appropriation of an offensive
term by the Asian American community. However, despite this the USPTO
rejected it again.

To persuade him to appeal the second rejection, Tam’s legal team pointed out that MOST SHARED
section 2(a) of the Lanham Act prohibiting the registration of derogatory
trademarks was being unfairly applied to the very minority communities the law
The Power of
was meant to protect. Cherokee Women

“The only people who hold trademark registrations for the term ‘chink’ are
Caucasians,” said Tam. “The only people who have been denied are Asians. Same
thing with Jap … the government has granted almost 800 trademark registrations American Indian
Poet John Trudell
for the term ‘slant’ and mine is the only one in all U.S. history to be denied for Walks On
being racist towards Asians.

“An Asian American activist wanted to make t-shirts that said ‘Chink Proud’ and Why Don’t You
he was denied for the same reason, yet ‘Perma Chink’, a company owned by People Just Get
Over It? Here’s Why
whites, is allowed.

“The Trademark Office doesn't want to deal with re-appropriation,” he said. Natives and the
American Holocaust
In 2011, the band submitted a new “ethnic-neutral” application for The Slants.
They hoped that by excising all mention of their own ethnicity they might get
more fair treatment. When the USPTO rejected the appeal, its lawyer addressed
The Wampanoag
the racial issue, opening the door to a new appeal based on procedural violations. Side of the First
Thanksgiving Story
However, when they took the case to the U.S. Federal Court of Appeals, Tam said,
“The judge [Kimberly Moore] said we don’t want to talk about those arguments
but about free speech.” Tam's lawyer was there to argue about procedural
problems with how their trademark registration was handled. He said that even
the Trademark Office’s lawyer was surprised, too.

“And so, at that point our case got hijacked to become this case about free
speech,” Tam claimed.

They lost again. The court accepted the methods of USPTO, validating that the
Trademark Office could use race to deny a trademark registration. However a
 week later the CAFC vacated their order, an extremely rare occurrence, and the
case was scheduled to be heard en Banc (before all judges of the court). Tam and
The Slants expected and received the support of the ACLU, but also won an
unwelcome ally — the Pro Football Inc. which filed an amicus brief.

RELATED: Washington NFL Team Thong ‘Elegant Way to Show Off Pride’

This time The Slants won. “It's no secret,” Tam noted, “that the lead judge in these
hearings both in the panel hearing which restricted our arguments as well as the
one who wrote the opinions, Judge Kimberly Moore, is a huge Redskins fan. A
very outspoken one. She's written papers specifically about the team. So when you
look at the written opinion and why she keeps referring to the football team
instead of what was actually at hand, one must consider if she had other motives
about this. If she had other motives than reprimanding the Trademark Office. …
Why, all of a sudden, did she take an issue that wasn't even in our arguments and
turn it into something else? I mean there could have been ways they could have
easily have said hey, let's take 2(a), let's break it down let's put some things in
place but they chose not to do that.”

“The court hijacked my case,” Tam said. “My goal was to develop culturally
competent laws and marginalized identities are being silenced because the
government is not culturally competent or being lazy. Who bares the cost of this?
It’s always marginalized groups.”

Tam’s attorney has pointed out that his appeal differs from Pro Football’s as his
was a First Amendment argument and theirs is a Fifth Amendment argument
about government seizure of property. He also said: “Our case had to deal with a
trademark registration, theirs is dealing with a trademark cancellation ... it's
subtle but it's extremely important in terms of what's being argued and what will
most likely move forward.”

Tam is hoping for a more nuanced discussion of what this means, and is emphatic
about his support for Change the Name. “I think what they did is phenomenal,” he
said. “What they did is highlight the injustices. More people are talking about the
issues than before. More people are championing Native issues.”

Read the full-length interview.

Jacqueline Keeler is a Navajo/Yankton Dakota Sioux writer living in Portland,

Oregon and co-founder of Eradicating Offensive Native Mascotry, creators of
Not Your Mascot. She has been published in Telesur, Earth Island Journal and
the Nation and interviewed on MSNBC and DemocracyNow and Native
American Calling. She has a forthcoming book called “Not Your Disappearing
Indian” and podcast. On twitter: @jfkeeler

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1 Comment
 tmsyr11
By all accounts, much like 'red' OR 'skin' or other (so-called deragutory
native-indian-indigenous-first nations terms/names), its O-K-A-Y - its
all-right if an Asian calls them-selves 'slants' or chinks' or 'gooks', but
not okay if non-Asian reference or use the terms? What happened to
all those studies or those surveys or those citations alleged to Dr's
reports or Psychological assessments related to the "damage" that
racial cause to non-white children? If a kid is referred to as by Asian
groups as "slants or by Native groups as "red" or "skin", this obviously
fits into the White Race Haters logic of referencing those cited
psychological assessments (not matter how biased-politically they are
to begin with)
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Wed, 01/06/2016 - 17:26

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