DGS49
Diamond Member
Cleveland MLB team to drop 'Indians' from its name, though not immediately
The Major League Baseball team in Cleveland, Ohio, will drop "Indians" from its name, according to a report from The New York Times and later confirmed by other news outlets.
www.cnn.com
The American (sic) use of the term "Indian" to refer to the indigenous peoples of our continent is more than a little bit bizarre. It is a vestige of Cristoforo Colombo's initial mistaken impression that, in 1492, he had landed his small fleet on islands off the eastern coast of India. We all know now that this was an almost-comical misapprehension..hell, even Colombo eventually figured out his mistake, but the appellation, "Indians," remains in common usage some 528 years later.
For reasons that were far from insulting, hundreds of American sports teams have chosen to call themselves the "Indians." In employing this name, they sought to invoke what they perceived as the honorable, brave, and - yes - warlike reputation of our native American predecessors, to exhort those teams to do their best within the context of their sports.
But what of the people who are referred to as, "Indians"? Do they object to being referred to with this comical historical semantic mistake? Clearly some do. Not many, but some. At the same time many of such people - the vast majority in fact - refer to themselves as "Indians."
In our contemporary culture, people are "graded" by how successful they are at finding things about which to be offended. We have come from colored people being offended by being called "colored," retarded people being insulted by being called, "retarded," handicapped people offended by being called "handicapped" (in spite of their entitlement-laden license plates), Oriental people offended at being referred to as "Oriental," to now indigenous people demanding not to be called, "Indians."
But in the context of sports, this is a good thing, manifestly. It is a good thing for people who make sports uniforms, promotional brochures, sports paraphernalia, baseball caps and stuff like that. It obsoletes mountains of such stuff and forces the teams and their supporters to go out and re-purchase their stuff - now at a higher cost. (I honestly don't know what's going on in the Nation's Capital with the "Washington Football Team." Is anyone buying jerseys with this written on them?)
I can't come up with a good insulting replacement for the name, "Indians." I'll leave that to others. But I feel more relief than I can even articulate about the end of this perpetual insult to the various nations of indigenous people living in our midst.
On a not-completely-different point, I wonder how long it will be before the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People gets with the program.