I will admit, that I never saw the harm in Native American Indian mascots and team names, (I lived in Atlanta for a while, did they ever change the name of their baseball team? I don’t know).
But there is something about the fact that Americans should, and for the most part, I think do, treat people with an elemental respect.
Yesterday, I started to write a brief synopsis of my mostly positive association with The Battle Flag of the South. I happened to catch a movie the other day, where Hollywood projected a racist redneck with the rebel flags and all. It was pretty blatantly stereotypical, but I don’t expect a high standard from the entertainment industry. They’re geared for the lowest common denominator. Maybe you’ll need to identify it for yourself, if you care to think beyond the emotional manipulation that makes us watch movies.
Anyway, back to Native American Indian mascots, the real reason I thought of Native Americans is in the context of the way Southerners are depicted. It seems sometimes, Northerners simply view Southerners who still sense regional pride in the battle flag as conquered people, whether they know it or not. I don’t think that fully addresses the complexity of the issue, but it is one aspect of it.
The Civil War has a lot of lessons. I’m a born Northerner now living in the South. The fact that the United States was preserved less than a hundred years after it was formed, is significant. The issue of slavery and its ultimate abolition was a major factor in the war, but it wasn’t the only one, and it wasn’t the only reason 17 year old young men went off to fight and die for their country, as they saw it at the time.
More later.
