The NCAA has stated, any school with a nickname or logo considered racially or ethnically "hostile" or "abusive" by the NCAA would be prohibited from using them in postseason events. Mascots will not be allowed to perform at tournament games, and band members and cheerleaders will also be barred from using American Indians on their uniforms. The ban began in 2008. Major college football teams are not subject to the ban because there is no official NCAA tournament.
The only way newcomers tend to notice American Indians is from the growth of casinos on tribal lands. I don't list gambling among the top thousand admirable human activities, but I won't demand American Indians stop running gambling joints until Trump and Bally and municipalities do.
My real question is, what do we do about these demeaning nicknames that College and Pro Sports Teams use these days? I cannot twist my sentences enough to refer to "the team from Cleveland called the Indians" and "the team from Atlanta called the Braves" I do not respect the the owners, the league, or the fans for allowing these teams to degrade a race of people.
I should ask “all persons of color," as Americans call anybody not totally Caucasian, what they think about when they go to a game with offensive Mascots.
Instead, I ask: How do we feel? We the fans. We the consumers. In Atlanta, not only do they trot out the cartoon image of the Braves, but the fans perform a chant with a chopping motion, which would be idiotic even if it did not have racist implications.
When I see Atlanta fans performing the chop, I want to ask an old liberal from the 1960s what she thinks of stereotypes of American Indians. But Jane Fonda was married to old Ted Turner, and she doesn't do protest anymore.
If you stop to think about it, it really is offensive to take a people whose religion, whose love of the land, whose suffering, is intrinsically mixed with race, and turn them into mascots. These conditions go back to earlier times, like the 1948 World Series, when white people didn't have to think about this stuff. But now we do.
Middle-of-the-road America (code phrase for white America) wakes up one morning and discovers, gee, jurors may have been in-fluenced by their own racial identity in the O.J. Simpson trial. How disturbing. Or Middle America discovers, gee, nearly half a million black American men are convening in Washington, and a man named Farrakhan, why, he sounds angry. How disturbing. Then anybody who can afford a ticket goes to the ball park and performs some stupid chop and wears a ball cap with a grinning American Indian on it. The choppers don't get it.
Is it reasonable to ask these two ball clubs to change their names? Universities like Stanford and St. John's actually did, and others have agonized over it. But at Florida State University, Chief Seminole -- bare-chested warrior on horseback, wielding a spear -- leads the football team onto the field. That college always trots out some real Seminoles who say they are not offended by the use of a warrior as a mascot for smash-mouth, roid-rage, beefed-up alleged student-athletes.
Plus, Daniel Synder who currently owns the professional football team in the American capital isn't about to give up the trappings and income of the Washington Redskins.
There is a glorious heritage in these teams -- Sammy Baugh, Bobby Mitchell, Henry Aaron, Mike Garcia. We won't see these nicknames changed in the short run. But I suggest that fans refrain from buying any souvenir with those degrading symbols. Some marketing executive just might get it.
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