The Cleveland Indians Are Dropping Their Racist Mascot and That’s a Good Thing

The Cleveland Indians made history this week when they announced that they would be eliminating their mascot, Chief Wahoo, from all uniforms. This has been a long time coming, as the mascot — portraying a gigantic grinning Native American drawn as stereotypically as possible — has been under fire from the past few years, and for good reason. The mascot is a racist and demoralizing thing, misrepresents the city of Cleveland, and showcases a disrespect for Native American people.

The mascot will be removed from all Redskins uniforms and the ironically named “Progressive Stadium” in 2019 — and hopefully it will pave the way for other teams, including the terribly named NFL team The Washington Redskins whose mascot — while not as cartoonishly racist — is still a bigoted stereotypical objectification of the Native American people.

Now, I am sure the same tired, boring, racist people will get up in arms over this in their usual tired, boring, racist ways, but before they do, they should consider this — is the goal of a human being to make a better society or to win an argument? This feels like a ridiculous question, but it seems to be the actual question here. Do the defenders of this racist logo, and the racist logos left in the Redskins logo’s wake, know why they fight for something as trivial as this? Do they actually want people to look at them as the kinds of human beings whose point of views are so narrow they don’t have room for other people? That’s the thing to consider.

We applaud the Cleveland Indians for removing their offensive mascot, and we hope that other teams do the same.

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