You’re a New York Times sports editor at the end of an eventful weekend. There was the Kentucky Derby on Saturday. The NBA and NHL playoffs are heating up (admittedly without any New York teams). The Yankees are firing on all cylinders, as are their arch-rivals in Boston. The Mets are, well, the Mets. There was PGA golf at the Wells Fargo tournament. There must still be issues worth discussing around the Giants’ and the Jets’ draft picks. And I assume Gotham has a pro soccer team (I can’t really be bothered to check.)
What do you, Mr. New York Times sports editor, lead your “Sports Monday” section with? A 2,000-word article bemoaning the continued popularity of American Indian team mascots.
In Europe.
It seems, according to the Times’s Andrew Keh, there’s a Belgian soccer team whose mascot and logo is an Indian named Buffalo Ben. “There’s the hockey team in the Czech Republic that performs a yearly sage-burning ritual on the ice, the rugby team in England whose fans wear headdresses and face paint, the German football team called the Redskins and many more,” Keh writes
Don’t laugh. This must be a difficult subject for a Times writer, so used to looking to Europe as a beacon of progressive guidance. But no -- this ignorance and bigotry have long flourished in European sport. Keh says (and I’ll translate):
For years, these teams were insulated from the vigorous discussion [ie. sanctimonious whining] about the use of this type of imagery by sports teams in the United States, where critics long ago deemed the practice offensive [to liberal sports writers] and anachronistic. This year, the Cleveland Indians [caved to a craven, hypersensitive MLB and] announced that they would stop using their Chief Wahoo logo on their uniforms beginning in 2019, continuing a decades-long trend in which thousands of such references have disappeared from the American sports landscape [victims of virtue-signaling liberals and spineless sports officials.]
Not that European sports fans have been allowed to enjoy their games completely unmolested. While there are few American Indians in Europe, every nation has its humorless academics, attention-seeking activists desperate-to-be-relevant journalists.
“Two years ago,” Keh relates, “Rachel Herrmann, a historian of early American history at Cardiff University,” noticed “a bunch of people dressed up as Indians” in a train station and found out they were fans of the Exeter Chiefs, a pro rugby team. It got her social justice sensors all a-tingle. She went back to her lair and spun out an essay with the exquisitely humorless academic title “Playing Indian: Exeter Rugby in a Postcolonial Age.” A local website picked it up. It became local and then national news.
Somehow, the media found “Stephanie Pratt, a cultural ambassador for the Crow Creek South Dakota Sioux and longtime resident of Exeter, England.” (Question: Do the Crow Creek South Dakota Sioux know their cultural ambassador is in Exeter? Did they despatch her to London and she only made it as far as Devon?)
Pratt has been to one Chiefs game. She saw the mascot (a costumed character named Big Chief), heard the fans’ war chants and watched them do the “tomahawk chop” and decided never to return. She said such behavior reduced almost 600 distinct tribes into a single clumsy caricature based on 19th-century stereotypes.
She’s gotta be fun at parties, no? Keh’s article goes on like that, as interminable as the NBA playoffs his paper doesn’t bother to put on the front page of its “sports” section. He finds a lot of offensive European teams, and a lot of academics and activists ready to be offended. (Readers do learn, on the other hand, that the Swedish government has an “Equality Ombudsman,” and said Ombudsman rejected two lawsuits against the Frolunda Indians hockey team -- the lone example of good sense in the article.
The Times sports page should be wary of hubris. The Washington Post has already fought this battle and lost. The newsroom cooked up white liberal outrage about the Redskins and made a 10-year show of its moral superiority and disdain for Skins fans. Then in 2016, the Post’s own polling showed that 90% of Native Americans said they had something better to do than be offended by the name of a sports team – almost exactly the same percentage that had something better to do 10 years before, the last time The Washington Post bothered to ask them.
So yeah you Times guys can celebrate the scalping of Chief Wahoo, and tisk at the Europeans, but you might want to lead your sports section with actual sports. And while you’re at it, find out if New York has a pro soccer team.
