In case you thought the renaming efforts would stop with the Washington Redskins’s bungled process, the Kansas City Chiefs may want you to think again.
The team announced last week that, after discouraging fans from wearing headdresses or Native American face paint for years, they would now be banning fans from entering the stadium for both. They will also be reviewing the “Tomahawk Chop.”
The Chiefs have said they won’t be renaming the team, but these changes move them one step closer to that. Fans embrace the identity of their team, and if Chiefs fans are no longer allowed to do so, there really isn’t a point. And the Chiefs are not alone. Chiefs team President Mark Donovan doesn’t think the team name is a slur, but it’s also too offensive to be personified in any way.
The Chiefs aren’t the only ones who will be inevitably renaming. The Cleveland Indians are on their way to renaming, and the Atlanta Braves will feel the pressure after they eliminate the Tomahawk Chop from their own games. Some sports writers have already taken to omitting their team names from pieces, the same virtue signaling tact they took with the Redskins.
The argument has always been a bizarre one, with Native Americans polling mostly in favor of Native American team names, while mostly white sports writers profess offense on their behalf. The argument goes that Native American team names make a caricature of Native Americans as a group, an argument that does not seem to translate over to, say, the Minnesota Vikings and Scandinavians.
Names such as the Chiefs and the Braves are meant to revere and honor the bravery of Native American warriors, not a commentary on or caricature of present-day Native Americans. Team names are chosen due to honor and reverence, and no one confuses Vikings fans wearing fake beards and spiked helmets as a slight against or an appropriation of the culture of Danes or Swedes.
The notion that erasing Native Americans from sports entirely is somehow a better honoring of their culture than what current teams are doing is a bizarre one. In their effort to rectify past injustices against Native Americans by white colonists, white liberals have somehow determined that freezing their legacies out of the sports world is a step in the right direction.
