Commission’s Latest Warpath
Civil Rights Commission speaks with forked tongues.

Mr. Clegg is general counsel of the Center for Equal Opportunity
March 15, 2001 9:00 a.m.

he United States Commission on Civil Rights has before it a draft statement on "Use of Native American Images and Nicknames as Sports Symbols." The draft calls for an end to Indian images and team names, on the grounds that they "are disrespectful and offensive to American Indians," particularly "in light of the history of forced assimilation that American Indian people have endured in this country." The commission may vote on the draft next month.

The first point to be made is the obvious one: The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights doesn't have enough to do these days and is a waste of the taxpayers' money. Once upon a time it investigated actual, heinous discrimination when few others would. Now there is, thank goodness, less discrimination to investigate, and no shortage of organizations — inside the government and out — to do so. But the commission, now dominated by politically correct ideologues, totters on.

The Indian statement is a case in point. There are some mildly interesting and entertaining issues here, to be discussed in a moment. But there is no reason to think that the presence of the Cleveland Indians or Midville Warriors is a national problem with which any part of the federal government need concern itself. There is nothing to investigate, and no expertise that the commissioners can bring to bear on this issue — certainly none greater than any sports-bar denizen with a decent knowledge of team nicknames, mascots, and rituals.

Americans name their sports teams after all kinds of things. I suspect that most teams are named after animals, usually predators or locally beloved, like Bengals and Badgers, respectively. Others teams are named after workers in local industries: Oilers, Steelers, Packers, Mariners, and so forth. There are also historical figures, like Cowboys, Forty-niners, and Patriots.

And some of these figures are ethnically identifiable. You have the Minnesota Vikings, for instance, and the Boston Celtics, as well as the Notre Dame Fighting Irish. For the religious fan, there are the San Diego Padres and the Syracuse Orangemen (shouldn't that be Orangepersons, by the way?).

Anyway, team names don't have much in common — maybe nothing — except one thing. Teams are not named after things that people don't like. After all, people will be rooting for the team and, in the case of schools, will call themselves whatever the team's name is, even if they aren't on it. While I'm largely ignoring the bizarre modern trend toward naming teams after abstract concepts, even here the names are positive: It's "Heat" and "Wild," not "Tepid" and "Tame." Likewise, the University of Southern California has chosen a name to endorse responsible and safe sex.

So it seems a little odd to suggest that naming a team after Indians is a calculated insult. More likely, the name will have some historical significance in a given team's geographic area. Another logical explanation is that the qualities we often associate with Indians are the same martial virtues that we like in our athletes: courage, strength, boldness, resourcefulness.

This is, in fact, a remarkable situation when you think about it. The white man comes, takes the Indians' land, kills Indians, and is killed by them. And yet the residual feeling is admiration. We respect and follow the Indians' expertise in the wild, borrow wholesale from their vocabulary (including thousands of place names, adopted by many states and cities), join "Indian Guides" with our children — and name our teams and ourselves after them.

I wonder if there is anything like this anywhere else in the world. You would think that the more usual course is for the conqueror to obliterate the memory of the vanquished and denigrate everything about them. Anglo-Saxon words became declasse after the Norman invasion, right? Did the Romans name their schools after barbarians? Do little German boys dream of being French? I doubt it.

Some Indian activists are nonetheless offended. It might be argued that that's all that really matters. They didn't pick the names, and why offend people if you don't have to?

But I don't think it's wrong to insist that a complaint be a reasonable one before acting on it. Some American Indians aren't offended, and actually take the symbols as a compliment. When Marquette High School on Michigan's upper peninsula yanked its Indian logo, the town's Native American community led the successful protests to restore it. Many Indians might object to the sort of ethnicity cleansing their "leaders" want. And why should self-appointed spokesmen for any group have veto power over everyone else? They may view the mascots as stereoptypical, but one suspects that the real problem is that — as leftists — they don't like the martial virtues with which their ancestors are being associated.

So I don't think that it is fair for the Civil Rights Commission to characterize the use of Indian names and images for sports symbols as, categorically, "disrespectful and offensive."

That said, however, I think it certainly is possible to be disrespectful and offensive in the way that Indian names and images are chosen and used. For instance, if the mascot's act includes getting drunk on too much firewater and groping the opposing team's cheerleaders, that would be a problem. Less frequently, the names themselves might be problematic. Thus, I wouldn't name a new team the "Redskins" now, since Webster's says the term is "usu. taken to be offensive." (On the other hand, this connotation is relatively new; my 1966 and 1969 editions of Webster's say nothing about the term being inappropriate — and, when you think about it, why should it be any more offensive than "black"?)

If the owners of the Washington Redskins want to change the team's name, that should be up to them. Team owners ought to be sensitive to public perceptions, and should strive to avoid insulting people on the basis of skin color or ethnicity. But this should be voluntary decision — not one forced on the Redskins by a lawsuit arguing that the team is violating the Civil Rights Act of 1964 because it is "federally funded" or a "public accommodation."

The Civil Rights Commission raises the specter of such dubious lawsuits in its draft statement, but this brings us back to where we started. This is not a national problem crying out for a federal, one-size-fits-all solution. If some teams have received legitimate complaints, they can respond to them. But there is no need for the Commission to go on the warpath.