Shame Day: Cleveland Indians

Today is an exciting day for fans of the Toronto Blue Jays. Not only does it mark their first game of the season, it marks the first game of a season predicted to be one that gives the team a shot at World Series. As a Torontonian [and someone who watches a fair amount of Major League Baseball when my granddad has it on after dinner] this should be nothing but good news.

Until I saw a commercial for today’s game.

See, the Blue Jays will be playing the Cleveland Indians. On the right is their team logo.

Now, I have seen and been offended by a lot of racist things, but the fact that Cleveland’s Major League Baseball team chooses to represent themselves with a grinning Native American caricature named, I kid you not, “Chief Wahoo” ranks very high up there.

It’s outrageous because, as you may have guessed, I am not the only person to have noticed this. Native Americans protest this logo annually. They have been doing this for 20 years. The only steps that have been made are to integrate two other logos, a script I and and block letter C, without actually moving forward with retiring the Chief Wahoo logo.

Of course, there are those who agree with me, and alongside them there are those who are “fighting back” against political correctness. Here’s the comments section of the article I just linked to:

These people are all missing a very key point: if the race were switched, this would have been stopped decades ago.

This is actually an image from a really fantastic graphic novel that deals with race, American Born Chinese by Gene Yang.

What if, for example, there were a baseball team named the Akron Chinamen. Actually, let’s even go with a standard,
inoffensive term, the Chinese. Their logo consisted of a racist Chinese caricature, complete with slits for eyes, jaundiced skin, and prominent front teeth. This was used for years to represent the city of Akron in baseball, and many people held the logo near and dear to their hearts. American-Chinese people protested this frequently, but after two decades have not been able to affect any sort of change.

If that sounds ridiculous it is because you are a logical human being. There is no reason whatsoever for Cleveland to have let this logo represent their baseball team and  in turn their whole city. It is shameful that this continues on today, to the year 2013, and racism should not be tolerated in the world of professional sports or anywhere else.