Chief Wahoo Should Stay

Over the weekend, Stephanie Liscio, an Indians fan and blogger took to the Sweet Spot blog to announce her auto de fé on Chief Wahoo.

The occasion of Chief Wahoo's persecution is "Caps Week" in which Lisco notes correctly that the retro "C" caps of the Indians are pretty stylin'. But Lisco transitions quickly into a short history of Chief Wahoo and her sincere hope for eliminating him:

It took more than 30 years for Chief Wahoo to make his first appearance on Cleveland Indians uniforms. In 1946, new owner Bill Veeck went to the J.F. Novak Company to design a mascot that "would convey a spirit of pure joy and unbridled enthusiasm." The design job went to 17-year-old Walter Goldbach. The new logo drawn by Goldbach lasted on team uniforms from 1947-1951, when it was reformatted into the present-day incarnation of Chief Wahoo. The name Chief Wahoo was eventually coined by sportswriters a few years after his creation. It’s interesting to consider that a logo widely described as racist and offensive made its first appearance during the season that the Cleveland Indians integrated -- the first American League team to do so, with Larry Doby.

Fascinating indeed. Notice that Lisco can't quite work up the courage to call Wahoo racist outright, since she knows that it was not intended to be racist. Instead "Chief Wahoo" is merely "widely described" as racist. It's not true, just a suspicion that "some people" have. We could say that there is a stereotype that Chief Wahoo is a negative-stereotype.

Liscio notes the baleful history of Clevlander racism that led to the creation of the franchise:

In 1903, the team came to be known as the "Naps" in honor of Hall of Fame second baseman Napoleon "Nap" Lajoie. After Lajoie’s contract was sold to the Athletics in 1914, the Cleveland team’s ownership wanted to find a new name. A committee of sportswriters was established to select the new moniker, aided by local fan input. The outcome was the name "Indians," supposedly in honor of the first Native American to play in the major leagues, Louis Sockalexis. (Sockalexis played for the Cleveland Spiders from 1897-1899).

The word "supposedly" is doing a lot of work here. For Liscio's argument to really make the dismount and land she can't just say that the people running the Indians organization have had laudable, even modern intentions since the club's founding. Instead we have to create suspicion.

Lisco brings up objections to "political correctness" only to dismiss them, with her finishing argument: "However, every time I look at Chief Wahoo I see a racist caricature, something akin to Little Black Sambo."

The problem with this comparisons are manifold. "Sambo" actually became a racial slur, "Wahoo" wasn't and isn't. "Sambo" caricatures were often used to re-affirm racist attitudes. He is drawn as slow and mulish. Wahoo is ebullient, which is positive, no? It's hard to even say that this broad smile is a stereotype, since (unfortunately?) no one thinks of Native Americans as joyful to the point of irrationality. When Americans think of Indians they tend to have in mind the crying man in the anti-pollution commercials, which is a stereotype but okay because it's pro-environement or something.

Anyway, consider the Fighting Irish logo of Notre Dame. Here we have a man dressed as a leprechaun, posed in the absurd fighting stance Conan O'Brien assumes when playfully immitating early 20th century boxers. The Fighting Irishman is as ghostly white, as Chief Wahoo is red. And we should remember that the Irish were once considered a race unto themselves, one uniquely prone to drunken brawling and subject to discrimination in America. But no one thinks that the Fighting Irish logo "is a racist caricature, something akin to Little Black Sambo." If you believe that, I can convince you that that Syracuse's Orange Squish ball, Otto, is belittling depiction of Scottish Protestants.

The suggesting of dropping Chief Wahoo comes around every so often. Even the Cleveland papers ran with an argument distressingly similar to Liscio's. Except for good measure he actually quoted a Native American named "Clarkson" who maintained (with a straight-face, presumable) that Wahoo was a "savage," and that if you asked Clevelanders to think of an Indian they would might even think of the image of Chief Wahoo. As his face was scrubbed from the Indians' promotional material and spring training facilities Tyler Kepner wondered if the Indians should replace their logo with something more like the Chicago Blackhawks logo. But columnists have denounced that logo as racist as well.

We can play this "I'm more anti-racist" than you game forever. And what will be the result? We'll pat ourselves on the back for the "discovery" that what was understood by our grandparents as a symbol "of pure joy and unbridled enthusiasm" is actually hateful. In order to congratulate ourselves for scrubbing him from memory, we must condemn them for tolerating him. In the meantime we belittle everyone else's intelligene and goodwill as well. No one has ever seen Chief Wahoo and spat, "Yeah, just look at this smiling Native Americans. What savages! I hate them!" Why? Because it is not a racist caricature.  

This campaign is a way of stigmatizing the past without understanding it. We assume, wrongly, that all attitudes towards Native Americans before our time were negative. The truth is much more complicated. Theodore Roosevelet bragged of having Native American heritage and many Americans still do.

There was no malice in the drawing of Chief Wahoo, there is no evidence that "Wahoo" is used as a slur, or that Chief Wahoo is a negative depiction at all. He was created to represent joy, for a franchise whose name was "supposedly" formed in the example of good-willed tokenism that it the hallmark of modern political correctness. Yes, Chief Wahoo is a caricature. So are nearly all mascots that include a human. There is no argument against Chief Wahoo that wouldn't also be an argument for changing the name of the franchise altogether.

And oddly, this campaign to purge sports of supposedly offensive caricatures, has the effect of making sports more white. Gone are the Redmen and the Fighting Sioux. Keep chugging along Trojans, Vikings, and Fighting Irish. Soon the anti-Wahoos will have a sports world in which non-whites are never depicted at all except in photographs - not as noble fighters or smiling silly with joy. Just not at all.