Double standards in using Native American Mascots

The argument

Those who defend Native American mascots argue that the objection to them is not applied consistently, and that the inconsistency is itself revealing. Sports teams routinely take their names and imagery from historical European figures, knights and Vikings among them, and no comparable objection is raised. These are also real historical peoples, often ones with violent histories, depicted in stylised and sometimes exaggerated form for the purposes of a crowd. If using a European warrior as a mascot is acceptable, proponents ask, it is not obvious what principle makes a Native American historical warrior different. The argument is that the difference cannot lie in the practice itself, since the practice is identical. A team adopting a warrior figure is doing the same thing in both cases: invoking strength, endurance and martial tradition as qualities it wishes to claim for itself. Treating one instance as honouring and the other as offensive therefore applies a double standard, and on this view a standard that singles out one group while leaving others outside it does not establish equality but departs from it. Proponents further argue that this inconsistency carries a cost beyond the logical one. Rules that visibly apply to some groups and not others invite the perception that particular communities receive special treatment, and that perception can foster resentment toward the very group the rule was meant to protect. On this account the campaign against Native American mascots risks worsening racial tensions rather than easing them, generating hostility where the practice itself generated none. Since the objection rests on a distinction its defenders cannot justify, and since enforcing it produces the resentment it was supposed to prevent, they conclude that it is not offensive for sports teams to use Native American mascots.

Context

If a sports team called themselves ‘the Knights’ and had a mascot of a knight in shining armour, it wouldn’t be offensive. Knights are European warriors. But if a sports team has a Native American warrior with a spear as its mascot, the imagery immediately becomes offensive.

Premises

Counter-arguments

There are two things wrong with this argument. Firstly, European knights have not suffered the same level of historical marginalisation as native American tribes. White Europeans were the dominant race at the time of their existence. By contrast, Native Americans have endured a long and ugly history of state-sanctioned racism. Therefore, the parallel with the European knight is not accurate. A better parallel to the use of Native American mascots would be to imagine if sports teams used caricatures of black people that played on negative stereotypes of the appearances of the black population, then gave themselves names like the Washington n****rs. This would be unequivocally racist and offensive. There are no double standards at play. Sports teams that employ Native American names and imagery do so in an offensive way against a population that has endured centuries of oppression and marginalization. Secondly, the use of Vikings as mascots is also inoffensive because there are no Vikings still living that would take offence to this. The same is true of Roman gladiators, Ancient Egyptian mascots or mascots depicting any other extinct ethnicity or civilization. The fact that Native American people still exist means that there are people to take offence, therefore, the act becomes offensive by definition.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P4] A knight has not endured centuries of repression. There are also no vikings still living to take offence at their depiction as a mascot.