“You already won! Chief Wahoo is gone! Why are you still out here complaining?”
Of course, Chief Wahoo having finally been removed from the team’s uniforms at MLB’s insistence didn’t stop thousands of its fans from displaying the plainly racist symbol at the ballpark yesterday, many of whom reacted to the protesters’ presence by performatively displaying their attachment to the caricature. Nor, of course, has it stopped the organization from selling Wahoo merchandise.
But more to the point, the protesters’ demand has always been two-fold: Not just “change the logo” but “change the name,” too. Until the organization changes its name—which was adopted in 1915 when white supremacy was simply pop-culture in America, and was not intended to “honor” anything about Native Americans apart from then-popular notions that they were fearsome and anachronistic savages—the protests will persist.
“There are only, what, 10 of you here? Are any of you Native American? I’m part Cherokee and I love the Cleveland Indians and Chief Wahoo!”
While “change the name” has always been a harder sell than “change the logo,” a group, including some of the few Natives left in Northeast Ohio to make the case, has organized to achieve this goal since 1992. That year, the Committee of 500 Years of Dignity and Resistance formed with the stated mission to “denounce the errant voyage by Christopher Columbus in 1492 and the ensuing 500 years of colonialism, genocidal conquest and racism” that resulted. Then, “after the quincentenary … the Committee decided to focus on the name and mascot of the Cleveland Major League Baseball team,” which, if nothing else, appropriates and trivializes this history.
That anyone would make such a complaint at all, let alone with such ignorance and vitriol, only shows how important it is that the Committee of 500 (now 526) Years is still here, in whatever number, with some force, to provide its regular reminder.
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This article appears in Mar 27 – Apr 2, 2019.
Love how privileged white Liberals are in 2019 that they can appropriate another cultures “precieved plight” and run with it as their own.
Such warm & cushy lives you must live to LARP as activists whenever it suits you. Maybe instead of reacting to Baseball Fans that have been reassured by Real Live Native Americans that their support of Chief Wahoo is nothing to be ashamed of, you can be proactive on some of the real issues that Native Americans face like unemployment, substance abuse and education.
…but nah, that stuff takes actual work and would require more than 1 day a year to show up.
Hey “Chief Tally Whacker,” if you’d bothered to read closer or click on the links above you might have noticed that the “Real Live Native Americans” in the 500 years committee have said loud and clear that they want the name changed. The National Congress of Native Americans, which is “the nations oldest, largest, and most representative American Indian and Alaska Native advocacy organization” has been similarly clear. http://www.ncai.org/proudtobe
Just because there are larger issues doesn’t mean we shouldn’t fix the small ones too, especially given the harmfulness of the symbolism. Of course, you surely don’t care about the larger issues either, or you’d never have posted your re-warmed Chuck Booms take here in the first place. Wait, Chuck, is that you???
Cleveland Frowns: if you’re looking for a pet to rescue, ho adopt a pitbull.
It is amazing how upset people like Chief Tally Whacker get at the idea that people of all races deserve basic dignity and respect.
More people at the opener wearing more Wahoo merch than at any time in recent memory. Not just wearing it proudly, but flaunting it. Funny how that works. Funny how the more you try to take something away from people, the more tightly they cling to it. Yesterday showed exactly how the vast majority of people in Cleveland really feel, just like every poll registers 85 or 90 percent in favor of The Chief.
Yesterday is what you will see for the next twenty years. Get used to it. It won’t change until The Chief is made illegal to wear in public and until it is banned from the ballpark for good. Clevelanders will continue to wear their Wahoo gear unti you pry it from their cold, dead bodies. And some folks will be buried in it
Make that “1995”…and I will wear it proudly until 2030…
By which time either it will have disintegrated…or I will have.
Christopher Columbus did not discover America. He didn’t fight the natives, he traded with them. He was tasked to be governor of an area of North America briefly but was removed from the position.
Maps from that time and as late as the 1800’s depict most of eastern Asia and all of North America as part of the Tartarian Empire. These maps also show many coastal cities that are now gone.
Why are you singling out descendents of the Caucasian lands? These are the Khazar Jews. Do you think these Khazar Jews are racist?
What’s a Khazar? Anything like “chazzer”…with the same hard “ch” sound as in Chanukah?
A chazzer is a glutton–someone who “eats like a pig”.–.in fact, the word is Yiddish for that animal.
Khazars are Jewish converts from the caucus mountains. They make up about 90% of the modern Jews around the world.
I have told these protesters, who are apparently unaware “Chief Wahoo is a Cartoon” I comb my hair like Dennis the Menace, but am not offended, because he is a cartoon. I preparation for the eventual banning of Wahoo, I have for years, been accumulating merchandise with his likeness, won’t buy any without it. I am therefore set, for at least the next 20 years, but probably won’t last that long.
There’s no way , legally, that “the eventual banning of Wahoo” can include wearing The Chief on clothing or on public streets. But the Tribe (pun intended) organization already has regulations in their fan guides about “offensive or obscene messages” on clothing worn at the ballpark by “guests”…
Which means that all they have to do is change those rules to include “offensive, obscene, or racist” messages. By adding that ONE lousy word, it’s quite possible for them to be able to ban any and all images of The Chief from what used to be known as The Jake.
The Pittsburgh Pirates already have such a rule in place, as do many other baseball venues. Disney is very strict about what can and cannot be worn inside its theme parks. Cleveland will probably follow suit.
Of course, average per-game attendance is already not that great. In fact, it’s among the lowest in all of MLB. But if they really want to shoot themselves in the foot and disguise even more fans as empty seats, they’ll see fit to ban The Chief. And after that major mistake, will they change the name? Perhaps.
This is a ploy by the Marxist Khazar Jews to remove all evidence of the former Tartarian Empire which included modern Russia and the Americas. Fake history created by the Khazars claims all these lands in both Asia and North America were sparsely populated by war tribes when in reality the people living there were all part of the Tartar empire.