Winchester Star
Wednesday, February 27, 2008

Removing offensive mascots not a 'whitewash'

In her Bits & Pieces column titled "What’s in a name?" (Feb. 21), Lynn Oldach-Engle offers her opinions on racially offensive school mascots. She asks, "Should we be removing references from our pasts due to fear of offense?" The answer is "no," we should not be removing references from our past due to fear of offense. We should be removing them because they already are offensive and always have been.

Oldach-Engle claims that telling students that their mascot has changed "jeopardizes their self-image, but also nullifies their existence up to now." What does she think degrading caricatures of Native Americans does to the self-image of Native American people?

Many schools have changed the name of their mascots successfully, without damaging the psyche of their students. In fact, caricatures do as much to distort the image of white people as anyone else. They subtly provide us with a false sense of superiority.

Using people of color as mascots is a continuation of a past in which white people have had the power to create “whiteness” as the norm for what it means to be human. People with dark skin were deemed less than human, thereby making them vulnerable to slavery, exploitation and becoming team mascots.

When schools change their objectionable mascots, it is not a "whitewash" of history as Oldach-Engle fears. Our racist past is not going away that easy. It is, however, an act of liberation from which the people who benefit most are white people. There are elements of the past that we are morally obligated to break with. Using people of color as mascots is one of them.

Rev. Eric Dupee
Dix Street