Glaring racism, then and now.

Did you know that people used to name their pets after ethnic groups?

Chalk Talk for Sunday Schools, by Harlan Tarbell

I just picked up an old book (1924) about drawings for Sunday School, and there it is right on page 30: a lovely story about two kittens, Snowball and N—-r. You see, one of them has white fur, and the other, black. I leave it to you to figure out which is which. Then I recalled that large, black dog in Jack London’s Call of the Wild whose name was ‘Nig.’

So people used to name their pets N—-r. Wow! And that was once considered to be completely normal, even as today most people would regard it as blatantly wrong. By our liberated, contemporary standards, this crazy racism seems otherworldly, a totally alien thing that we clearly would never do now, right?

…And then I remembered all the mascots that are named after native folk, today, for the entertainment of the masses: the Cleveland Indians, the Chicago Blackhawks, the Washington Redskins, the Atlanta Braves, the Kansas City Chiefs, and many, many more.

So on the one hand, naming personal pets after ethnic groups is totally wrong.

Yet, naming public pets (mascots) after ethnic groups is totally fine.

WTF?  No, it isn’t.

Go Whitehonkies!

As a Chicagoan, I am truly proud of our hockey team, the Blackhawks. They’ve been kicking ass on ice like they were born to do it.

But their name is ridiculously offensive. (I don’t care if we’re all used to it by now. Stereotyping a brutally decimated minority group into a mascot is wrong on so many levels.)

To illustrate the point, I propose the following name change:  the Chicago Whitehonkies!

Sure, it’s more of a slur than “Blackhawks,” but at least white folks are in the majority.  (And seriously – it’s not like we suffered genocide and displacement at the hands of Native Americans.)  I say, we’re better off stereotyping ourselves than those whom we’ve wronged in the past.

In the meantime… GO WHITEHONKIES!!!