On the Warpath

Hey, anybody catch the Double Header between the Crackers and Negroes last night? See the highlights from the Kike-Chinks game on sportscenter? Wouldn't that seem weird? Incredibly offensive, I'd say. So offensive that I get that butt-puckered, oh geez sensation just writing those epithets to pose the hypothetical. But we don't feel that sort of defensive welling-up when we're cheering the Redskins or Indians or Chiefs on. Ask somebody at a game sometime if they think any of those names are offensive and I wonder if they'll just laugh it off, pretend as if they're just ingrained, the way things are in our curious little country. Let's try to see why we don't question these teams en masse, and what they all might have in common that we so easily can disparage them openly.

 Well, a quick internet search brings us to the oracle of all internet wisdom, Wikipedia, which lists out the myriad sports teams that use offensive or racially-identifying words in their team names. The vast majority, almost all of these names infact, are derived from indigenous peoples that are vastly underrepresented in the general populations, and most of which also, have been decimated by war and political obliteration, (such is the case with the continental American teams.)

 Now, some people would say, and do, that these are proud, identifying names for groups that enjoy the attention, and any reasonable person can see that there is no way that we could know that, and little chance there's ever been a discussion with those groups affected. Still others would say that the names are identifiers only, and have no associated value that would put the afflicted groups into a particular light. However, what would be the point of just listing groups of people on helmets and jerseys without some implied value statement about them? No one has Grackles and Cowbirds as team names just to list out passerine species, but we have vibrant cardinals, fierce blue jays or gorgeous cardinals, each with their implied worth and value. Such, I believe, is the case with Florida Seminoles and Canyon Comanches, and many of the other tribes and peoples that are archived not in libraries or their homelands, but on bleachers and scoreboards. It's a travesty to the peoples that have been obliterated from our collective conscience and from ancestral lands. 

Native American writer Sherman Alexie often jokes that he went to an all-white high school where the only other Native American was the team mascot. He also is aghast at the mainstream's perpetuation of stereotypes with The Lone Ranger , a movie recently released where Johnny Depp does his best to assimilate no native culture into his portrayal of Tonto. The whole issue raises a concern for me that our society has moved so far in the past 50 years, (not far enough) to become an inclusive, racially and socially integrated culture, but we have left these indigenous peoples so far out of our viewfinder that the mention of something so rudimentary as changing sports teams names is laughable. It causes me to wonder if we are not truly the integrated culture we'd like to claim, but merely a squeaky wheel culture that adapts when it has to, but for a culture that is so small, so effectively exterminated as native peoples, we turn away and leave them to their vices, forgotten.

america's cup, roosevelt field mall, mike glennon, metro north, paul oliver