Common sense and common decency have taken some uncommon hits in the last year, for reasons that are obvious to any American who's caught even a tiny portion of Our Only Available President's act. So it's refreshing when the two commons manage to pull off a W.
Which is to say: The Cleveland Indians are finally ditching Chief Wahoo.
This will undoubtedly provoke the usual cry of "Political correctness run amok!" from the usual suspects, who never met a racial slur or stereotype they wouldn't fervently embrace. That Chief Wahoo is an obviously racist caricature far out of its time doesn't matter to those usual suspects, given that our entire national policy openly seems to yearn for those rightfully gone times.
And yet ... it is 2018, no matter how much Our Only Available President and his constituency wishes it were not. And so Chief Wahoo belongs on history's ashheap, not on the sleeves of baseball players whose demographic is increasingly diverse.
Consider, after all, its genesis: It was created allegedly to honor Louis Sockalexis, a Penobscot Indian who played for Cleveland for three years in the late 1890s. Sockalexis' first year in Cleveland was 1897, seven years after Wounded Knee, generally regarded as the last gasp of Native American resistance to white rule. By the time Sockalexis came along, the process of herding Native American children into white schools whose purpose was to eradicate their culture was already well under way.
Chief Wahoo was a product of those times, just as this and this were a product of those times. It's safe to say not even the Usual Suspects (or at least some of them) would regard the latter two, in the America of 2018, as anything but the outrageous racial slurs they are.
So why shouldn't Chief Wahoo be regarded that way?
No comments:
Post a Comment