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While it’s a promising start, changing the Washington Redskins is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the obsession with co-opting Native American / Indigenous iconography
Great news! After 87 years of using a racist name, the football team formerly known as the Washington Redskins caved to public and sponsor pressures to change their name. The close to 2,000 high schools and colleges that to this day use Native American / Indigenous people and symbols as their “mascots” won’t be so easy.
The name has always been racist, and as pointed out in our Lady AntiBLM piece, you either know and don’t care, or don’t care to know. But the change this time was made for a different reason entirely.
For Lady AntiBLM, the name change was a self-serving move to boost ratings and propel them into the spotlight after years of declining sales and attention. With the Redskins, it seems to be more about pressures from the top down.
Public pressures from protesters and activists tirelessly working on this front are certainly not to be devalued. Their unending work to educate and inform is always important, but the key to understanding the Redskins name change is how the public pressure translated into lost revenue for the team.
En-masse, corporate capitalism has many mechanisms to deal with any broad social backlash, one more popular way is through philanthropy.
Are you a rich industrialist that takes advantage of their workers, wrecks the environment, and price gouges at every turn to increase your own profits? No Problem!
Just promise to give roughly less than 10% of your wealth to some vague ’cause’ like ‘climate change,’ (the key is that it has to be a cause that the people who are criticizing you care deeply about). Then, just sit back and soak up all the positive press. Problem solved.
This trick has historically worked very well for Jeff Bezos and the many other “new” robber barons of tech and industry that we have today. It’s a method that can also be gamed to enact social change.
Basically, philanthropic lip-service is what spawned the Redskins Charitable Foundation and created the conditions that allowed them to maintain the name for so long, despite public pressure. It gives fans of the name a soundbite to cling on to:
“See, look! They aren’t so bad!”
It is also the exact reason why changing the roughly 2,000 schools with racist mascots isn’t going to be easy.
The Redskins have massive corporate sponsors. If one of them leaves, it definitely stings. So the stakes and incentives are high for them to appease these reactionary corporate blobs. High schools on the other hand often operate on tight budgets and rely on community support.
Well, if the community is on board, then what’s the problem?
We have officially arrived at our first hurdle: in many cases, the community by-and-large is not on board. Take, for example, Cheyenne Mountain High School in Colorado Springs Colorado.
Granted, Colorado Springs has long struggled with a pretty wretched past (and present) regarding racism and bigotry. But we were recently tipped off to a Cheyenne Mountain High alumni group Facebook page and decided to dig into the comments on a post regarding a petition to change the mascot from “The Indian” to literally anything else.
Here, we see examples of the same tired old excuses that constitute the majority of the arguments leveled against removing racist monuments. From conspiratorial nonsense to the, “it’s my heritage,” defense.
There are over 700+ team mascots for high schools that still carry some kind of Indigenous / Native American person, symbol, or iconography. Why so many, still? It’s 2020.
These symbols are an active form of indoctrination that is perpetuated by the mechanism of forming positive memories and associations with these mascots and names. Its primary vehicle is nostalgia, and that’s a hard emotion to shake.
When you attack the mascot, “The Indian,” semiotics dictates that you are also, in turn, attacking someone’s most treasured high school memories.
Studies have also shown that these mascots, while providing a boost to white people who derive joy from the stereotyping of minorities, also negatively affect the self-esteem and mental health of Native American youth.
It is time we shake this cycle of passive acceptance of racism. We are allowing a disservice to our children as they form positive memories associated with lingering ugliness that our country still carries and reveres.
Alumni groups and communities of parents are not going to be the answer to this problem— many of them fight tooth and nail to preserve their glory years. Moving forward, it is up to the current students of these institutions.
The students constitute the lifeblood of these schools. Without students, there are no quarterbacks, no football team, no means for unfulfilled parents to vicariously live out their teenage years all over again. No marching bands providing the soundtrack to do the “Tomahawk Chops”, all the disgustingly racist traditions die with the new generation— if they want it.
According to the most recent actions and activism of the zoomer generation, it would seem that they do want it.
So sorry, Karen, regardless of your thoughts of a petition being a BLM conspiracy, it seems that your kids have the right idea. It should be up to them to decide what mascot they want to represent their youth.
