Change racist sports team names.

This fall, after months of coronavirus restrictions, professional sports in the United States have returned to something close to normal (MarketWatch). MLB playoffs are in full swing, Lebron James won his fourth NBA championship last week, and the NFL regular season continues every Sunday. But as a large portion of the United States undergoes a racial reckoning, professional sports are working to adjust accordingly.

Welcome back, and happy Wednesday! Real talk: I don't watch much sports. So I was celebrating the name change of the football team based in DC without fully realizing how much further we need to go. I'm delighted to introduce Charlie Lahud-Zahner, who breaks down the importance of changing all the names of racist sports teams. And, if I add, extending the same sentiment to schools, cities and other spaces in need of a rebrand.

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Nicole

TAKE ACTION

Get educated about the specific histories behind sports teams' names. Start with this Texas Tribune article unveiling the violent history behind the original Texas Rangers.

Use social media to put pressure on these teams and team owners to change their problematic team names:

Cleveland Indians (@indians)

Texas Rangers (@rangers)

Braves (@braves)

San Francisco 49ers (@49ers)

Kansas City Chiefs (@cheifs)

GET EDUCATED

By Charlie Lahud-Zahner (he/him)

Back in July, the owner of the football team formerly known as the Washington Redskins bowed to pressure from corporate sponsors (including Pepsi, Nike, and FedEx) and agreed to change the team name to the Washington Football Team (Washington Post). However, as Suzan Shown Harjo (a Cheyenne and Hodulgee Muscogee activist who has rallied against the Redskins name for more than 40 years) noted, one would hope that financial pressure from investors would come before a state-sanctioned killing, not after (Washington Post).

“All of a sudden...they’re saying, ‘Change the name,’ and what’s the difference — George Floyd was murdered before the world and corporate America woke up,” said Harjo (NY Times).

Though Indigenous activists like Harjo have been pushing against racist sports teams long before FedEx and Nike, only now that white/corporate America has expressed interest in racial inequality as “corporate activists” have popular sports teams undergone renewed scrutiny (NPR).

Even names that seem benign to most people, like the San Francisco 49ers, have a racist history. As a Mexican-American living in California, I know how this state that was once part of Mexico was originally Indigenous land (Library of Congress). Through celebrating and maintaining focus on California’s white colonial history, the 49ers are one of many teams that exemplify the erasure of Indigenous people through celebrating the “glory” of white colonial history.

The historical psyche of California’s Bay Area is built around the California Gold Rush (PBS). In January 1848, James Wilson Marshall discovered gold flakes in Northern California, near modern-day Sacramento. A few days afterward, after the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo, that land effectively passed from Mexico to the United States. The ensuing gold fever led to an international mass migration to the Bay Area in 1849—hence the name the“49ers” (History.com).

For many in California, the legend behind this period of economic growth is the legend of the American frontier: a mythology that rugged white settlers moved west to build and cultivate this land by the skin of their teeth (The Conversation). Accordingly, the San Francisco 49ers mascot is “Sourdough Sam,'' a goofy pick-ax wielding, Levi-loving Paul Bunyan looking character seemingly on the hunt for errant treasure.

However, this seemingly innocuous character and narrative ignore the fact that the Gold Rush happened in conjunction with the genocide of Native Californians. While the year 1849 was “historic” for white settlers, it was disastrous for the various tribes who had settled in the Bay Area for the 10,000 years prior (Culture Trip). The white miners, with help from the state and federal forces, murdered up to 16,000 Indigenous people of various Bay Area tribes. Today the Muwekma Ohlone tribe is recognized as a conglomerate of “all of the known surviving American Indian lineages aboriginal to the San Francisco Bay region” (Muwekma Ohlone).

Peter Hardermann Burnet, California’s first governor, told legislators in 1851 that “a war of extermination will continue to be waged between the races until the Indian race becomes extinct...the inevitable destiny of the race is beyond the power or wisdom of man to avert” (History.com). Local and state militias receiving state funding systematically killed, and even scalped, Native Americans. Nearly 80% of the 150,000 Native Americans who lived in California pre-gold rush were wiped out through disease or killings (KCET.org)

The 49ers are only one of many professional (and semi-professional) American sports teams that reference to violence against Native peoples or directly use Indigenous imagery in their team names. In the NFL, the Kansas City Chiefs are being pressured to change their name (USA Today), and in the MLB, the Braves, Indians, and Rangers have been the subject of discussion. When Kansas City played San Francisco in Super Bowl LIV back in January, writer Vincent Shilling accurately referred to the game as the “Genocide Bowl” (Indian Country Today).

Learning more about the history of racist team names brings light to the reality of the United States being built at the cost of—or on the backs of—Indigenous, Black, and Brown Americans. Changing team names isn’t about obscuring or erasing our history. It’s about refusing to glorify genocide and the gross characterization of Indigenous peoples. It’s completely possible to acknowledge a dark history without venerating false idols in sports. (Yes, I’m looking at you, Sourdough Sam).

Yet there is growing evidence that change can happen slowly. Besides the Washington Football Team, other organizations have also changed their team names or mascots in recent years. The Cleveland Indians removed “Chief Wahoo,” a racist caricature of a Native American man from their jerseys in 2019 (Global Sport Matters), the Chicago Blackhawks recently banned headdresses at home games (CNN) and, as of late September, the University of Illinois is moving closer to choosing a mascot to replace “Chief Illiniwek” (Chicago Tribune).

In 2013, when asked about removing the slur from the Washington Redskins’ name, owner Dan Snyder callously claimed, "We’ll never change the name. It’s that simple. NEVER — you can use caps” (USA Today).

He was wrong. Seven years later, he changed the name. And if we can educate ourselves, keep the pressure on these teams, and advocate for change, more teams will follow suit.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

Many professional sports teams, such as the Kansas City Chiefs and the Cleveland Indians, have names or mascots that revere genocide and/or racial violence.
The San Francisco 49ers are named after the gold miners of 1849 who, with help from the state, killed thousands of Indigenous residents.
We can create change. In 2013, the owner of the Washington Redskins claimed he would never change the team’s name. In 2020, bowing to public pressure, the name was changed to the Washington Football Team.

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Nicole Cardoza 6/18/20 Nicole Cardoza 6/18/20

Take down Confederate symbols.

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Hello all!

Thank you so much for your kind notes re: yesterday's difficult piece. I appreciate it. And I'm glad so many of you are committed to taking an unflinching look at our past and present.

Thank you to everyone that has contributed one-time or monthly to make this possible. If you haven't already, you can make a contribution via PayPal, Patreon or Venmo (@nicoleacardoza).

– Nicole

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TAKE ACTION

1. See if your U.S. state has any Confederacy symbols on this map. If so, contact your state representatives to remove. Some states even have petitions in place for you to sign.

2. If you're from outside the U.S., use this lesson to discover how racist symbols are still pervasive in your country.

Please note: today's email is not encouraging you to personally deface public or private property :)

GET EDUCATED

Tear every statue down.

Let's start with the basics: there's a lot of monuments and symbols (like a flag) that honor the Confederacy, an unrecognized republic of seven states that seceded from the United States during the American War. And right now, protestors are taking them down.

Although there have been consistent and ongoing pressure by local communities to remove these statues for decades, this conversation got significant attention five years ago, nearly to the date (June 17), when Dylann Roof, a 21-year-old white supremacist, walked into Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in South Carolina during Bible study and opened fire, killing nine Black people. There's a lot more to this story and its relevance to current events, but for brevity's sake, I encourage you to read this NPR article that reflects on its impact five years later.

Investigations of Dylann Roof illuminated (among many racist and harmful things) his fervor for the Confederacy, and his dedication to uphold it, which began a larger rally to remove Confederate flags and statues from public display. At this time, the Confederate flag was still flying high in front of the South Carolina state capitol (until activist Bree Newsome scaled the pole and took it down herself).

These conversations were amplified in 2017, when a right-wing rally in Charlottesville, VA to protest the removal of a statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee turned deadly. James Alex Fields Jr. drove his car into supporters of the statue removal, killing Heather Heyer and injuring 28 others. Read more here >

Before we go any further let's get one thing crystal clear: the Civil War was about slavery. Many people will argue otherwise – that it was about the economy, or state rights – but those concerns were all rooted in their relationship to enslaved people. Southern states were worried about the economic impact of slavery being abolished, with so much capital already defined by the ownership of people, the labor they provided, and the burden of integrating those people as actual citizens upon their freedom. Also, as the United States started to expand to new lands, and some of those lands were settled as free states where slavery was illegal, those pro-slavery saw the value of those lands decrease from the offset. States wanted state rights for slavery. So I don't care how anyone tries to justify it – this was about slavery. Here's a few places you can read more.

So the Civil War happened, the Confederacy lost, and the end of that war marks the end of slavery as we know it in America (known as Juneteenth, which we will discuss in tomorrow's newsletter). But there wasn't a happily ever after ending here, obviously. The Reconstruction era began, and, as we discussed in yesterday's newsletter, people, particularly in the South weren't all that happy about the new freedoms of African-American people. Raising the Confederate flag and honoring Confederate soldiers was an act of rebellion in the face of changing times. Which is why even a bumper sticker of a Confederate flag says much more than others may want to admit: a declaration of support for states that believed, at minimum, that slavery is economically justified.

And since there's people around today using these symbols to justify and accelerate violence and harm, it's long overdue for them to come down. As of 2019 the Southern Poverty Law Center found 1,747 Confederate monuments, place names and other symbols. Aljazeera has a map of 771 statues across the country. What's wild to consider is that, despite the fact that the Confederacy lasted for five years, most of these symbols were established in the 60 years following the war. In fact, at least 32 Confederacy monuments were dedicated or re-dedicated since 2000, well after I was born! So how have we spent lifetimes commemorating a five-year period of our history? Are these statements of an event in history, or how we see the future?

Many people, including Trump, believe that the statues should stay, citing that it erases the character of the brave people that fought for our country. Some also believe taking them down may make it easier for us to forget. You can read some of the nuances around taking down the statues in this article. But it's not hard to understand why so many protestors are toppling them now, perhaps as a long overdue performance of dismantling the systems that have oppressed Black people for far too long.

We can pretend that the debate over Confederate symbols is about preserving or erasing history, but really, it’s about our values. It’s about whether we care more about statues standing than people falling. Because we know, through statistics, video evidence and story after story, that the people who are most hurt by those symbols of hatred are falling at disproportionate rates across the country.

― Theresa Vargas for this article in the Washington Post

Let's remember that the Confederacy lasted for five years. Five years! So many things in American history have lasted longer than five years. Countless humorous articles and memes have been written about this, but I particularly like this list from Buzzfeed back in 2015.

Here's my list of things that have lasted longer than the Confederacy:

246 years (and counting): Slavery in America
The first enslaved African people were brought to America in 1619 and was "abolished" at the end of the Civil War in 1865 – although you can argue there's plenty of systems in place that still enslave African America people to today's time.
339 years: Laws prohibiting anti-racial marriage
Laws prohibiting interracial marriage were first established in 1661, and Alabama was the last to abolish in 2000.
5 years: "Justice" for Eric Garner
Eric Garner was murdered by a NYPD police officer who put him in a chokehold in 2014. It took over five years for the NYPD to terminate that police officer, and for a grand jury to decide he will not be indicted with any federal charges. I use justice in quotations because, to me, justice would be Eric Garner not being dead in the first place – and nothing will come close to that.
131 years: The time it took for Quaker to change the Aunt Jemima branding
I'm probably going to do a whole newsletter on this topic, so if you're curious, read this article to understand how racist and harmful this type of branding is.

ARCHIVES

Change racist sports team names.

TAKE ACTION

GET EDUCATED

KEY TAKEAWAYS

RELATED ISSUES

PLEDGE YOUR SUPPORT

Take down Confederate symbols.

TAKE ACTION

GET EDUCATED

Tear every statue down.

PLEDGE YOUR SUPPORT