Southpaw #13: What's in a Name?
What’s really driving teams’ decisions to abandon racist mascots?
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A few weeks ago, we wrote about college basketball’s burgeoning COVID problem. As it turns out, we may have actually understated the problem.
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What’s in a name? As it turns out, a lot of money.
On December 14, the baseball team formerly known as the Cleveland Indians announced a plan to change its name. With the announcement, the Indians became the second major sports team this year to drop a racist mascot, following the decision in July by Washington’s NFL team (previously known by a racial slur against Native Americans) to temporarily adopt “the Washington Football Team” until the organization secures rights to a new name.
The decisions by the two teams to drop their branding are welcome, if long overdue, developments. With two teams now set to change their names, it’s tempting to call this the start of a trend. That said, there are still three major professional American franchises that use racist Native American mascots—the Chicago Blackhawks (NHL), the Atlanta Braves (MLB), and the Kansas City Chiefs (NFL)—and the owners of all three of those organizations have indicated that they’re in no rush to follow Washington and Cleveland’s lead. This growing division raises an obvious question: Why have some teams embraced a name change while others have not? For those who’d like to see the name-change trend continue, this isn’t just idle speculation. Understanding the forces that led Washington and Cleveland to opt for a change could suggest how to harness those same forces against the other, more stubborn holdouts and have broad implications for sports-related activism.
First off, the changes certainly did not come about, as both team statements suggest, thanks to the benevolence and compassion of ownership. As any Washington football fan will tell you, Washington’s owner, Dan Snyder, is a rotten and cynical shell of a man. Snyder is among the most reviled men in the NFL (a high bar), and he has been credibly accused of overseeing and participating in a toxic workplace environment rife with sexual assault, harassment, and bigotry. (According to reporting by The Washington Post, in 2008, Snyder directed a former team employee to create a “supercut” video of Washington’s cheerleaders inadvertently exposing themselves during a calendar shoot in 2008.) Unsurprisingly, Snyder also resisted the team’s name change until the bitter end. Although Cleveland owner Larry Dolan does not reach Snyder-esque levels of evil, he has hardly been a beacon of enlightenment. As SB Nation reported this week, Dolan has for decades ignored Native American advocacy groups’ protests against the team’s name, and he said as recently as last year that he stalwartly opposed any change.
But neither is it the case, as some nominally progressive outlets like HuffPost and SB Nation suggested this week, that the cultural zeitgeist has simply changed so much that racists mascots have become obviously untenable. Yes, Washington’s team name was an obvious slur, and Cleveland’s mascot, “Chief Wahoo,” was a grotesque stereotype. Equally appalling is the fact that Atlanta’s fans frequently perform the “Tomahawk Chop” at games, and Kansas City and Chicago fans routinely wear native headdresses. (Both teams have recently banned the headdresses.) But the reality is that activists and people of generally good sense have been pointing out the racist overtones of these mascots for decades without finding a receptive audience. Still, opponents of racists mascots have not really won the hearts and minds of Americans. As polling in the aftermath of the Washington Football Team’s decision found, close to 50 percent of the adult population opposed the change.
If, as some observers believe, Kansas City, Atlanta, and Chicago will soon follow Cleveland and Washington’s lead and change their names, it will be because of one thing: money. That, after all, is why Snyder and Dolan made their respective decisions in the first place. Snyder notoriously announced Washington’s name change only days after FedEx, one of his team’s main corporate sponsors and the namesake sponsor for the team’s stadium, threatened to pull its signage from FedEx Field unless Snyder made a change. Cleveland is similarly staring down the barrel of financial disaster, as baseball continues to struggle to attract viewers, and thus dollars, from the same young demographic that most opposes racists mascots. Moreover, after Cleveland abandoned “Chief Wahoo” entirely in 2019 in favor of a simple “C” on its uniforms (in response to pressure from the league’s branding arm), the team has found itself with a different branding nightmare. Without an eye-catching mascot to plaster all over merchandise, Dolan has been faced with a clear economic incentive to find another one that could sell hats and t-shirts again.
Of course, these financial realities were made possible by decades of activism from Native American groups who slowly chipped away at a prevailing mood of apathy that allowed fans and corporate sponsors to look the other way even as they recognized the obvious harm that racist mascots created. If they didn’t succeed in winning over broad segments of the population to their cause, they did succeed in convincing the people who sign the checks to give up on racist branding. At the end of the day, this is probably good news for those who hope to see the demise of the Blackhawks, Chiefs, and Braves brands as well, since it’s much easier to convince a handful of corporations to withhold precious sponsorship dollars than it is to persuade a large number of rabid sports fans to abandon their beloved brand. The lesson is pretty clear: if owners budge when their wallets are threatened, activists should do their best to target key sponsors and build momentum behind boycotts. Within organizations, players should credibly threaten leagues with shutdowns if they don’t meet activists’ demands.
Ultimately, the politics of name changes start to look a lot less complicated if we stop analyzing these changes as nebulous indicators of shifting winds and start understanding them as hard-headed financial decisions. Admittedly, this isn’t a particularly romantic way to approach social change in sports, but it is an approach that yields results. Even more importantly, it’s an approach that helps make sense of leagues’ increasingly inconsistent responses to calls for reform. For example, Major League Baseball earned lots of praise this week when it announced its decision to reclassify seven former Negro Leagues as professional leagues, extending recognition to the thousands of Black players who found themselves on the wrong side of the MLB’s color line. The announcement conveniently came only a week after the league completed a harsh reorganization of its minor leagues, a move that will further disempower players who make practically no money and are denied some of the same protections that players in the Negro Leagues were denied. Has the league experienced a moral awakening in the span of a week? Of course not. One of these things costs money, and the other doesn’t. Mystery solved.
The Negro League reclassification is a rare example of a decision that costs no money to make yet still contributes to a substantial social good. As the Washington Football Team’s ongoing struggle to secure the copyright for a new name proves, name changes do not fall in that sweet spot. To spend even a little money, teams need to be threatened with losing even more. If activists and athletes make that principle a central tenet of their protests, they’ll be able to change much more than names.
RODNEY’S ROUNDUP
Do you want to read about . . .
. . . the worst year in sports history? “2020: The Year in Sports When Everybody Lost,” by David Chen, Joe Drape, and Tiffany Hsu in The New York Times (December 16, 2020).
. . . an open letter from Boston Celtics players to Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker about facial recognition software? “Governor Baker, regulating facial recognition technology is a racial justice issue,” by Boston Celtics players in The Boston Globe (December 16, 2020).
. . . the limitations of the MLB’s decision to reclassify the Negro Leagues? “MLB can add Negro Leagues to official records but can never change what it did to Black players,” by Howard Bryant for ESPN (December 18, 2020).
. . . Jeannie Morris, the trailblazing sportswriter who became the first woman to cover the Super Bowl? “Jeannie Morris, Chicago author and pioneering sports broadcaster, dead at 85,” by Rick Kogan in The Chicago Tribune (December 14, 2020).
. . . the racist origins of the Indians’ mascot and its surprising connection to the state of Maine? “This Penobscot baseball player inspired the Cleveland Indians name ‘for all the wrong reasons,’” by Emily Burnham in The Bangor Daily News (December 18, 2020).
. . . the evolution of Naomi Osaka’s activism? “How Putting on a Mask Raised Naomi Osaka’s Voice,” in by Elena Bergeron in The New York Times (December 16, 2020).
Let the record show that the "Tomahawk Chop" is sadly quite popular in KC, too. - a fair-weather fan