Mascot Controversy essay

“The Washington State Board of Education has passed a resolution urging school districts to stop using Native American mascots, the Olympian reported.” (ABC news). We can recall that these mascots were deemed “full of pride, integrity, courage” and so much more by the fans, promoters, and teams. People say the mascots are “okay”. But has that ever made anything in the world “okay”? In that sense, war, and everything that happens with it is “okay” too. Is it okay to take images from cultures we essentially know NOTHING about and use them for our own entertainment? To take the identity of someone else and commercialize it to the world? The term Redskins means nothing like we use it today. It is not just the name of a sports team. Native American images should not be used as mascots due to the misleading concepts that people take away from the terms and images. We’ve taken their culture, pride, tradition filled ways and turned it into nothing more than a silly image for a sport.
America is showing it doesn’t care. People with power are allowing discrimination to continue, with that said: 45% of Indians living on reservation report that the use of Native American Mascots contribute to discrimination (Price). This statistic taken from a survey done with Sports Illustrated tells us that the people that we supposedly are uplifting don’t think it’s uplifting. As a matter of fact Native Americans think that the mascots are contributing to discrimination. If we’re saying as a whole that the opinions of others do not matter, then, what message are we conveying to the world? We’re saying that as Americans, we’re being even more pompous than people already think we are. Also from a Sports Illustrated article a statement was given by Gross, “can’t remember a time when people on the reservation weren’t arguing about the team name, evenly divided between people who were proud of it and those who were ashamed.” (Price) This statement alone lets us know that this is a controversy.