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sports
The curious case of Chief Wahoo
DANIEL STYLER Staff Writer
During my early elementary school days, my wardrobe almost exclusively consisted of sports-related clothing. I was completely indiscriminate when it came to the team depicted on my T-shirts, sweaters, jackets, and hats, so long as I thought that what I was wearing looked cool. Teams that I had no allegiance to or interest in were well-represented in my dresser drawer, all in the name of ten-year-old Daniel’s idea of high fashion. I was quite fond of Cleveland Indians apparel. In particular, ten-year-old me loved the overthe-top caricature of an Indian (the team’s choice of words, not mine) depicted on their hats and jerseys. This wasn’t just any Indian, either. This was Chief Wahoo, the cartoonish, very red-faced, headdress-wearing American Indian with the triangle-shaped eyes, wide smile, and bright white teeth: Mark Shapiro, echoing earlier statements by the team’s owner, stated the following: “Chief Wahoo’s not going anywhere” and the Indians’ team name is “recognition of our pride and affiliation with the first Native American baseball player.” someone via racial caricature is a bit perplexing. It seems to be the Aboriginal equivalent of the Los Angeles Dodgers honouring Jackie Robinson, the first African American to play Major League Baseball, by replacing the iconic interlocking LA logo on their hats with a depiction of Little Black Sambo and his dark, da rk sk i n, excessively white eyes, and exaggerated bright red lips (he could be holding a baseball bat for good measure).
Twenty-six-year-old me thinks this is a problem, and this problem was articulated in a recent Cleveland Scene article by Sam Allard: Chief Wahoo is “an aggressively racist symbol, and it’s mortifying if you take thirty seconds to look at the image, or think about it in a human context, or any context other than, you know, a ‘logo.’” Chief Wahoo isn’t just a harmless caricature drawn by a street artist depicting some nameless kid skateboarding or playing guitar; it’s a caricature that has the effect of portraying an entire race of people in the least dignified way imaginable. Despite innumerable protests – including annual Opening Day protests held in Cleveland – against the use of the Chief Wahoo logo, he is still featured prominently on every uniform the Cleveland Indians wear. Earlier this year, Cleveland Indians president the obiter dicta
Louis Sockalexis, a Native American, did indeed play parts of three seasons with the Cleveland Indians in the late 1890s, and is often credited (though not universa lly so) as being the first person of Native American ancestry to play Major The CleveLeague Baseball. OH, AND WHEN YOU NAME SPORTS TEAMS AFTER RACIAL land Indians Using Sockalexis may be the GROUPS, THINGS LIKE THIS HAPPEN. as continued jusmost egretification for Chief gious offender Wahoo, though, appears to be nothing more when it comes to offensive logos in professional than an example of a bad (and overly conve- sports, but they are certainly not alone. nient) case of revisionist history. The Washington Redskins, for instance, are Sockalexis played fewe r than 100 games for the currently enduring controversy over the team’s team, dealt with racism and taunting through- name. Two of the most prominent sportswritout his short-lived career, and was an alcoholic ers in America, Bill Simmons and Peter King, (he once injured his ankle after jumping from are both boycotting the use of the nickname the second-story window of a brothel in a state Redskins (with Simmons calling them the of drunkenness). Joe Posnanski, one of the most Washington D.C.’s in a recent article). This is distinguished and well-respected sportswrit- not particularly surprising, as it is difficult to ers of this generation, asks the following: “Why see how the term Redskins can be said without exactly would people in Cleveland – this in a evoking negative race-based connotations. time when Native Americans were generally viewed as subhuman in America – name their I do not consider myself to be some sort of team after a relatively minor and certainly trou- politically correct zealot, and often find myself bled outfielder?” rolling my eyes at some of the things people find offensive. But it is discouraging when, in Even if Bob DiBiasio, the team’s VP of Public 2013, we are still talking about why it is wrong Relations, is sincere when he insists that Wahoo to disparage a historically underprivileged is a means to “acknowledge and foster the and marginalized race of people (and to make legacy of ” Sockalexis, fostering the legacy of money via merchandise sales while doing so).
Is it a bad time to be studying law?
» continued from page 2 thought was a trusted source. A shrewder individual would most likely have avoided Manning’s fate. Cryptography has developed to a point where drug dealers can deal Schedule I narcotics openly on online black markets such as Silk Road without criminal repercussions thanks to the anonymizing aspects provided by new technologies such as the onion routing network (Tor). Senator Chuck Schumer has called Silk Road “the most brazen attempt to peddle drugs online that we have ever seen … by light-years.” This technology was fundamental to how WikiLeaks protected the sources of leaks such as Cablegate in 2010. Greenberg predicts that information leaks of this type are inevitably on the rise. Despite their legality, I am becoming more and more convinced that they are better servants of justice than the law itself. Manning was sentenced to 35 years for exposing the vast misconduct of the American military to a population that deserved to know. There is something sick about a legal system that calls that justice. monday - september 16 - 2013