Rid American Sports of Racial Stereotypes
Published: November 10, 1991
To the Editor:
The baseball playoffs and World Series have played contemporaneously with Senate hearings that focused on racial and sexual discrimination. Anyone choosing to watch the home games of the Atlanta Braves would learn that ethnic stereotyping continues to infect our cultural life.
Baseball fans the world over watched and listened as cheering partisans -- including former President Jimmy Carter and his wife, Rosalynn, as well as the Atlanta Braves owner, Ted Turner, and his fiancee, Jane Fonda -- supported their Atlanta team with the now infamous "tomahawk chop," accompanied by some form of "Indian" war cry.
Atlanta is not the only city with a sports franchise whose name belittles the original Americans. Cleveland has the Indians, whose logo is an insulting racial stereotype of a crazed looking "redman" with big teeth. On Sunday afternoons, "Hail to the Redskins," with its resounding incantation of "the warpath," echoes through our nation's capital.
Many have argued that it is unfair to suggest that Braves fans (or fans in Cleveland, Washington, Kansas City or at any college with an Indian team nickname) intend their vocal and enthusiastic support to belittle anyone. We agree. Sports fans simply identify with their teams, and enjoy vocalizing their support.
But intent is not the issue. As a people, we should be concerned about our sensitivity to the impact of racial stereotyping on its victims. Probably nobody meant any harm laughing at "Amos 'n Andy," or rolling their eyeballs with "Beulah." But we have progressed to the point where it is scarcely imaginable we would tolerate a team nicknamed the Rochester Rabbis or the Boston Babes.
Nor would we tolerate team icons that reflected stereotypically on African-Americans, Hispanics, or religious or ethnic minorities. Yet we propagate 19th-century notions of native Americans as savages, interested only in beating the tom-tom, singing war chants for hours on end and taking scalps.
Our concern goes beyond the injury suffered by the objects of this insensitivity. Those of us whose work brings together children of differing backgrounds know that impressionable children are all misled and therefore injured by the perpetuation of racial and ethnic stereotypes.
Let's rid our sports world of this unfortunate throwback to a time and mind-set in our history we should be embarrassed even to witness in the United States of the 1990's. It is time for us to cease the trivialization and unintended ridicule of the many native peoples who live among us -- with all the rights, responsibilities, cultural sensibilities and national stake we hold as dear -- as Americans. LAMAR P. MILLER JOSHUA P. BOGIN New York, Oct. 23, 1991 The writers are with the Metropolitan Center for Educational Research, Development & Training.