That’s my first, and probably last, stab at writing an Onion-style headline for this website.
The inspiration was Bob Costas’ monolog on last night’s edition of Sunday Night Football. Each week, Costas offers up preachy little bromides as he tries to sound stern, smart, and important. Instead, he typically comes across as a sanctimonious pseudointellectual. And so while I watch a lot of football, I usually do my best to avoid Costas’ weekly sermons.
However, once it was announced that this week the wise old manchild would be discussing Indian mascots and imagery in sports, I figured I should suck it up and see what he had to say.
I couldn’t have disagreed more with Costas’ opening remarks, a dated and cliché-ridden apologia for the ongoing use of Indigenous team names and mascots. I’m not going to go in depth at this time about why I think it’s wrong. For now I’ll simply note his tired old claim, that remarkably racist caricatures like the Atlanta Braves’ Screaming Brave or the Cleveland Indians’ Chief Wahoo are on a par with the Minnesota Vikings, is ludicrous for a variety of reasons, not limited to:
- There haven’t been Vikings for half a millennium but there are still millions of Indian people.
- It’s different when a bunch white Minnesotans, largely of Scandinavian descent, embrace a team named for their ancient heritage, versus a bunch of white people whooping it up when a different ethnic group is co-opted for their team names and macsots.
- A little thing called colonialism. Europeans got the Americas by killing and stealing from Indians. So white America mascotting Indians is akin to Germans mascotting Jews. True.
- The idea that, say, the Kansas City Chiefs or Chicago Blackhawks are “honoring” Native cultures so defies reality as to be laughable. The Chiefs and Blackhawks are profiting from Indian culture. Or rather, they’re profiting from a two-dimensional, stereotypical misrepresentation of Indian cultures. That’s very different than “honoring” them.
The opening to Costas’ soliloquy disappointed me, but it did not surprise me in the least. I don’t expect much depth or insight from him. 
Rather, spouting the latest conventional wisdom is usually his calling card.
Which makes what he said next so interesting.
After doing all he could not to draw a line, Costas then drew one. Regarding the Washington Redskins, he asserted:
Redskins can’t possibly honor a heritage or noble character trait. Nor could it possibly be considered a neutral term. It’s an insult, a slur, no matter how benign the present day intent . . . isn’t it clear to see how an offense might legitimately be taken?
Costas, no doubt, was drawn to the topic by the press surrounding President Barack Obama’s recent comments on the issue. Last week the chief executive said that if he owned a team named the Redskins, he’d “think about changing it.”
So now Costas is jumping on the bandwagon. And that’s a good thing.
Because to the extent that Bob Costas is representative of the broad middle of this country, the massive cultural majority who don’t think Indian mascotting is a problem, it signifies a shift. Mainstream America may finally be recognizing the overt racism of the epithet Redskin, which is up there with other old timey epithets like Darkie, Slanty-Eyed, Greaser, and Hook-Nosed.
Hopefully, a pious milquetoast like Costas coming around signifies the beginning of a sea change. Perhaps one day relatively soon we will actually get to the point where living, breathing cultures are no longer reduced to ahistorical stereotypes by profiteering corporations, and, of all things, fucking universities that would make George Orwell blush.
As for the specifics of the Redskins’ case, I recommend the following scholarly (but highly readable) article, which thoroughly exposes the “honoring them” platitude as nothing more than an outright lie.
Linda M. Waggoner, “On Trial, The Washington R*dskins’ Wily Mascot: William Lone Star Dietz,” in Montana: The Magazine of Western History (Spring 2013).
It turns out that the “India
n” coach the team is supposedly honoring wasn’t even an Indian. He was actually a white guy, a draft-dodger who pretended to be an Indian by stealing the identity of a real Indian man who died in World War I.
I shit you not.
Watch out Chief Wahoo. You’re next on the Hit List, motherfucker.