The Cleveland Indians will soon no longer be the Cleveland Indians, and President Trump is not happy about it. Reports over the weekend revealed that the team will no longer use its current name, prompting a response from the president.
Oh no! What is going on? This is not good news, even for “Indians”. Cancel culture at work! https://t.co/d1l0C9g6Pd
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 14, 2020
Trump is right. It’s not good news. The team can do what they want, but they should not be changing the name.
A common refrain is that the name is racist and offensive to Native Americans. Sure, white liberals may feel that’s the case, but the overwhelming majority of Native Americans do not. A 2016 poll from the Washington Post revealed that nine out of 10 Native Americans had no issue with the Washington Redskins name or logo, and seven out of 10 had no issue with any Native American names or imagery in sports.
If this does not bother the Native American community, then why should the organization bother changing something so ingrained in the team’s history? They have spent 105 years as the Cleveland Indians. That’s what fans in Ohio, throughout the country, and across the world know them as.
It comes across as a hollow move by the team. Sure, Major League Baseball can go ahead and say that they’re fighting against racism and give the impression that they are woke to appease white liberals. After all, the league’s commissioner has been trying to chip away at the Indians and their former Chief Wahoo logo since at least 2017.
Meanwhile, when it comes to making substantive changes to our society that would improve peoples’ lives, the Cleveland Indians and Major League Baseball are silent.
For starters, the Indians play in a taxpayer-funded stadium, a raw deal for the people of their city. They had no issue with the people of Cuyahoga County shelling out $84 million for a stadium for them, and no problem taking $3.5 million from taxpayers earlier this year to pay for some stadium upgrades (including an expanded parking lot for the players).
The Indians, like other MLB teams, have no problem partnering with their state’s lottery to perpetuate a highly regressive form of voluntary taxation that preys upon the poor and those who suffer from gambling addiction. It disproportionately eats away the paychecks of low-income earners, but it seems unlikely that MLB will ever address it.
They also push alcohol ads on the general populace. Like many teams, the Indians have alcohol sponsors, including a domestic beer and a craft beer. Major League Baseball aspires to be a family-friendly product, but according to the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, children who see more alcohol ads growing up are more likely to abuse the substance as adults.
Not to mention, they are part of a league that lobbied Congress to exempt Minor League Baseball players from federal minimum wage laws. Wearing Black Lives Matter patches on jerseys, as the Indians did, does nothing to change this either.
No one can force the Indians to keep their old name, but let’s not pretend this is some grand move. It’s little more than yet another empty gesture from the beneficiaries of corporate welfare.
Tom Joyce (@TomJoyceSports) is a freelance writer who has been published with USA Today, the Boston Globe, Newsday, ESPN, the Detroit Free Press, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the Federalist, and several other media outlets.
