Parodies Piss Off Racists

The other day Frederick Joseph, a Manhattan area activist, went out wearing a Washington football team parody t-shirt. Instead of the Indian head mascot, the logo featured the bust of a white dude with the term "caucasians" underneath instead of the actual team name. He documented it on instagram and twitter.

Joseph's interactions with the public were actually not that surprising. He said himself, the reactions were disappointing, but not unexpected. Sports fandom can be pretty rabid and nonsensical to start with, but the backlash to Colin Kaepernick and the whole national anthem craziness doesn't make rude, obnoxious and ignorant responses to such a subtle parody shocking. You can read all about this public opinion experiment on several news outlets, including The Washington Post, USA Today, Yahoo Sports, YouTube and many others.

Predictably, Washington fans lept to defend themselves. Joseph pointed out a particular poll was cited as evidence that 9 out of 10 American Indians polled think the current mascot name is okay. I posted about this poll before. Joseph points out the poll was debunked by The Nation, and Joe Rosenstein wrote about the dubious poll for the Huffington Post as well. It took me a while to track down these articles, after searching for terms such as "Redskins Poll Debunked", or "false Redskins poll" or other similar phrases. The results were dominated by the original press releases by the Post and CBS, and even ESPN celebrating the original Washington Post poll.

These articles confirmed my earlier suspicions of foul play. It is a bit of a coincidence that the Washington Post, which covers Washington football, conducted and published the poll. But also, the poll, done by telephone, only polled 504 people claiming to be Native, without any sort of background check, or confirmation of actual Indian status. This highly publicized poll attempts to counter similar polls and studies done across the country by various other civil rights groups, and universities.

Once again, it seems that a false or misleading narrative has garnered the loudest, most easily found voice on this subject. The good news is change will come. The right people, in the right places are agreeing with these sentiments. California banned Indian mascots from all high school athletic departments. Lord Jeff is no longer the unofficial mascot at Amherst College. The Laughing Brave and Chief Wahoo are no longer part of the Braves or Indians marketing. These are big strides, and the end game will be a Washington football namechange. It's coming, patience.