The war of wokeness has landed on the banks of the Connecticut River, where the city council of Agawam, Massachusetts, has just repelled the latest assault by the cancelers.
At stake: a high school whose sports teams have for decades been mocked for sounding like baked goods, but which these days is interpreted as racist.
Agawam is a small city in Massachusetts. It’s near Springfield, right off of I-91, and on the Connecticut border. Agawam has a Six Flags amusement park and a population of about 28,000.
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The city is named after the Agawam, a local tribe of Algonquins who allied with English settlers around 1600, forming the sort of lasting peace that didn’t always exist between the colonists and the natives.
The town’s name honors this tribe, as does the local high school’s logo: a Native American with a “headdress” that has the letters AGAWAM. Now, the Agawam are not known to have worn feathered headdresses, but that’s not the main point of contention. It’s the team name that’s causing problems.
They’re the Agawam Brownies.
Combined with the Native American imagery, “Brownies” is taken as a racial slur, even though “brown” isn’t the color historically associated with Native American stereotypes. Over recent months, especially as the Washington Redskins dropped their name, activists and locals pushed to scrap the name.
The town council in early September stood athwart the zeitgeist and said no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no — a unanimous vote that the team name and its brown and orange colors would remain.
“It’s the pride of Agawam,” said town councilor George Bitzas, “and all these old-timers. … But now, they come out with change — change the name, change streets, soon they’ll probably ask us to change George Washington‘s plaque on Main Street.”
The push to change the name isn’t brand new, though — although the focus has changed.
“Athletes at Agawam High School in Massachusetts have petitioned administrators to change the school’s nickname,” the Los Angeles Times reported in 1987. “Something about Brownies just doesn’t get many people fired up.”
“We should have Betty Crocker as our mascot and say, ‘Let’s go, turn up the oven,’” one athlete said.
Cheerleaders used to pass out home-baked brownies during games, and this apparently didn’t contribute to the sense of masculinity among the football players.
The New York Times reported on the plight of Agawam’s athletes, subjected to taunts such as ”Bake the Brownies,” ”Burn the Brownies,” and ”Chomp the Brownies.”
So, nearly a thousand locals in 1987 signed a petition, begging the school board to change the team name.
Why didn’t they change the name back then? The New York Times reported, “Nicknames such as Mohawks and Warriors have been the most suggested alternatives to Brownies, but there’s fear that they would offend Indian organizations, whose protests led the University of Massachusetts to change its nickname [in 1972] from Redmen to Minutemen.”
