exeggutor:

everyone who died at the battle of hogwarts missed All Star by Smash Mouth’s release two days later

(via charlottefinn)

Hey! So this week some news broke that in Fox’s upcoming TV show version of Minority Report, the Washington Football Team With A Racist Slur For A Name would have a face lift in the show’s fictional near-future, being renamed the Washington Red Clouds.  The name is a reference to the real life Red Cloud (Mahpiya Luta), chief of the Oglala Lakota at the turn of the 20th century.  My immediate reaction was, “Ugh, that’s really not that much better,” and since it was met with an earnest question of why, I’ll explain here, where I don’t have to do it in 140 characters.

For me, the problem is that it’s just about the most surface level idea of “respect” that one could be imagine.  Listen, “redskin” is a slur.  It just is, the matter is settled and the fact that a major network cable series will address that (even as the network itself still airs Redskins games without any asterisk) kind of shows that.  The problem is, as has been pointed out by people like the US President and Ta-Nehisi Coates regarding African American race relations, racism isn’t over because you decided to stop calling someone a slur in polite company.  It’s about more than that.  Hell, it’s about more than actual outright racist caricatures like that of the Cleveland Racist Caricatures, who somehow keep avoiding being included in people’s outrage about the whole sports team issue.  It’s about two things: appropriation and mascotization.

[Sidebar: fictionally renaming a football team in Virginia after a Lakota man who was born in Nebraska smacks of a lazy, “We wanted the name to be familiar so we just googled ‘indian history red name.’”  Further, while Red Cloud was a noted war chief and political leader who helped lead the Oglala people’s resistance even in peace, it should be noted that Red Cloud’s War ended in the Treaty of Fort Laramie, which the US Government never honoured, leading to the Great Sioux War.  His “victory” in these struggles was the creation of the Red Cloud agency (a precursor to the reservation), which the US government never honoured and later repeatedly moved to different states, relocating the Oglala and other Native Americans because they wanted the land and its resources.  Even his latter peaceful years, starting with a peaceful trip to Washington to try to stave off the Great Sioux War, were marked by Washington’s continual disrespect of and, in the case of the Dawes Act, outright theft of tribal holdings.  In fact, he was such a great, intractable negotiator that Indian Agents basically lied and cheated their way into more stolen land by using children as signatories in absence of Red Cloud and Sitting Bull.  Naming a Washington football team after a man whom Washington repeatedly cheated, lied to, relocated and, from 1866-1868, just tried to flat out kill, isn’t just lazy.  It would be very specifically egregious.

Moving past that lengthy sidebar, we start with the issue of appropriation, which I feel like people are getting more and more comfortable understanding, as evidenced by the fact that when white kids at music festivals dress up in headdresses or their dads wear them at Blackhawks games, we understand it as being inappropriate.  However, the issue of appropriation goes further than that: it extends to the teams themselves, and the simple idea that using terminology and iconography that isn’t yours and, in fact, belongs to a marginalized people, is inappropriate.  It’s even more inappropriate when you consider that until surprisingly recently, it was often difficult, if not actually prohibited in times and places, for aboriginal people to learn about and partake in their own culture, including those terms and icons.  It’s one of the pillars that the Residential Schools (Canada) and Boarding Schools (US) were based on.  For a lot of aboriginal people, the inappropriateness of non-aboriginal people appropriating our images is heightened by the fact that the ability to use those images itself has, until recently, been a form of white privilege.  The fictional Washington Red Clouds invoking the name and image of a Oglala leader and his people is inappropriate in a way similar to how we considered Rachel Dolezal to be, to shamelessly invoke a recent event.

Beyond that, and extending the critique past the Washingtons and Clevelands to basically every sports team, amateur or professional, that uses aboriginal iconography or terminology, is the issue of mascotization.  In short, it’s the idea that using a people as a logo or mascot in the same way that you would use a bear or natural disaster is inappropriate because you’re treating them like an object.  A common rebuttal to this is, “I know a dude on a rez who wears a Cleveland cap!” and my response is just, “Well, self-identification is a muddier issue but it doesn’t change the basic issue of someone from outside the culture using the culture as an object.  There’s a fellow native dude in my building who wears a Blackhawks hat and while I don’t like it, dude’s gotta do him.  However, using native people self-identifying (or saying it’s okay in general) to ignore accusations of mascotization is, in general, some bougie-ass cherry-picking white bullshit.  It’s fun to point out to that this argument has a big hole that aboriginal people are the only non-white group it’s acceptable to do this for, and point out that things like the Celtics are an issue of self-identification by a group with power.  Anyhoodles.

The reason the issue of mascotization is important, separate from the issue of slurs or appropriation, is that it continues an inaccurate and, in ways, harmful idea of who aboriginal people are.  Thomas King (and I know I bring him up a lot, but The Inconvenient Indian is a genuine must-read for any westerner) talks about it as continuing the image of aboriginal people as something from the past - the “Dead Indian” - and discourages thinking about aboriginal people in a modern sense.  After all, barring formal events, we don’t really wear feathers and facepaint in our daily lives.  We look just like you - and since a lot of us are white-passing, I mean exactly like you - and we have modern issues that need addressing.  When the pervasive cultural idea of an aboriginal person is that of a chief or brave from centuries ago, it prevents people from thinking of us as an active, living part of culture that is ongoing and adapting.  It tells you that aboriginal people are something from a museum and not your neighbours, which in turn slows down progress on issues pertinent to us now - erasure, living conditions, land rights, etc.  The Washington Red Clouds might not have a slur in their name in Minority Report, but they still continue the same salient image of aboriginal people, and that’s really not progress.