NCAA ban on mascots

[rainmaker]

Originally posted by Mark Padgett
That being said, I can't wait for Juulie's take on a school that calls it's team the "Fighting Quakers".

Whenever there's a Quaker student at that school, (which is about 4 years out of every 6) there's an editorial in the school newspaper about how inappropriate it is for the mascot to be Benjamin Franklin dressed in colonial garb. For one thing, although he was raised a Quaker, he wasn't very observant as an adult, and while most Quakers of his time were firm believers in Jesus, Franklin was a deist like Jefferson and others in the "elite" leadership. Furthermore, Quaker people don't feel honored when a group of rowdy football players get arrested for getting drunk and trashing someone's house (it happens about every 5 years or so). But most of us are too busy trying to stop the war and save the world to add another hopeless cause to our roster. So we keep sending one student to Franklin every so many years, and hope that someday, an historian of note will suggest that Benjamin Franklin's memory would be better honored by calling their teams the Lightning or the Patriots or the Almanac or something.

Chuck, I agree with the thing about people cant be made to feel inferior without their own consent or however it goes. I agree in theory. In practice, it appears as though if children are treated poorly from the beginning, they never learn how to "not-consent", and thus the principle isn't applicable. I guess you could say they don't have any consent to give. That goes for racial mistreatment, gender mistreatment (a mother who hates men, and belittles her son throughout his childhood), physical, sexual and emotional abuse and so on. A child has to be given the opportunities of learning to give consent, or she never learns that skill. To blame an abused child for his own inablility to stand up for himself is just piling on, it seems to me.

In talking about this psychology, I'm not saying that the Native Americans are abusing their own children, although I'm sure some do, as in every group. But Native Americans and African Americans have been uniquely abused in having their children taken away and "brainwashed" on a routine basis over a long period of time. African Americans do have a thread running through their culture of standing up against that and many have been able to keep up a cultural dignity in their families, churches and other groups.

Native Americans, however, for what ever reason, haven't been as able to pull that off. For about 75 years, in many, many tribes, ALL the children were forcibly removed from their families and required to live in mission schools for 8 to 12 years. They were not allowed to learn their own languages, they weren't allowed to wear their own clothes, they weren't allowed to accumulate possessions, or indeed to have any human individuality at all. If they didn't capitulate, they were beaten or starved. What chance did the children raised in that environment have of having any self-esteem, or any sense of how Indians ought to be viewed by others, or how to resist the damaging opinions of others? Or of teaching their children those skills, if they were fortunate enough to be allowed to raise their own children? How could those people learn to resist the negative stereotypes that appear to them to be "just the way things are?" For people whose entire self has been completely demolished from their infancy and on through their own children's childhoods, yea, it is too that hard. That's just basic psychology.

When someone finally did stand up and say, "Enough!" we should be big enough to say, "Wow, didn't realize we were so wrong. We sure won't do it again."

It may be that the NCAA is going too far in eliminating mascots like the Utes and the Seminoles who have given permission and have worked out amenable agreements with the schools involved. But just as an overall policy, I think it's civilized and polite for someone who is giving offense to stop it, and not pour salt into an open wound.

I also agree with the person who said the Redskins ought to change their name. I think that was one of the first teams to be protested, and they've been among the most recalcitrant in their reaction.

[Edited by rainmaker on Aug 8th, 2005 at 01:23 AM]