How many name changes are required?
White racism against American minorities must be in terribly short supply, with demand for evidence of white racism must far exceeding supply. How else to explain recent charges that the name, “Cleveland Indians” is racist? The charge is invariably coupled with the predictable demands that the team change its name.
Some will no doubt claim that the term, Indian, is inherently racist, it being the product of the misperception of early European explorers. The woke-aholics usually insist on the term "native American" as proper. But isn't anyone born within the borders of the US a native American?
We've certainly progressed far beyond slavery and Jim Crow laws, given this low level of complaint.
The woke mob has clearly affected the Cleveland Indians organization. Management has issued a statement that sounds suspiciously like a case of Stockholm Syndrome. Rest assured, we have been told, the organization is eager to embrace its "responsibility to advance social justice and equality." The team is going to determine "the best path forward."
Does anyone doubt that this is a euphemism for capitulation? How about finding the best path to something as mundane as playing in a World Series?
If something as trivial as jettisoning the name "Indians" can help lead to "social justice and equality," why stop there? What about the Cleveland Cavaliers, former home of our newly crowned woke philosopher-king, Lebron James?
It's no accident, as the Marxists like to say, that the primary university of the former slave state, Virginia, is known as the Cavaliers. According to the Encyclopedia of Virginia, a Cavalier is a person characterized by "a concept that attaches the qualities of chivalry and honor to the aristocratic class in Virginia history." What was the historic aristocratic class of Virginia other than slaveholders? We are told that the Cavalier writers of the South presented a "romanticized masculine portrait of elite authority in Virginia" during a time that includes the institution of slavery.
The name Cavalier provides a twofer the must annoy our morally enlightened. Not only does the name suggest a flattering portrait of the slave owners, but it smacks of "toxic masculinity" that can only be an affront to right-thinking womyn.
The name Cavalier has to go.
But why stop there? What about the Cleveland Browns? Browns! Has there ever been a non-Caucasian entering that stadium who didn't feel just a little unsafe, where a color so close to one's racial or ethnic identity is held in such contempt. Isn't this name a demeaning appropriation of the description of all non-Caucasian races?
To make matters worse, this name, this color that can signify any "person of color," is now irretrievably associated with an organization that has been for years an abject failure. Doesn't this fact contribute to the bigotry of low expectations? The team is one of only a few that has never been to a Super Bowl. Fans beg to have the Browns' players as pall bearers so that they can let the deceased down one last time.
The name Browns has to go.
But why stop there? The name Cleveland, that of the city itself, comes from a sordid source. The city was founded by Moses Cleaveland (that's how he spelled it). Cleaveland fought for the colonies during the American Revolution. We have been told by the New York Times in its "1619 Project" that the American Revolution was fought specifically to preserve slavery, and the Times never lies.
Moses Cleaveland sailed along the shores of Lake Erie in 1796 and then up the Cuyahoga River. He surveyed the land and established a city, right in the middle of Indian territory. He didn't negotiate, ask, or purchase. He simply colonized. Can there be a better example of white supremacy and imperialism?
To name a city after such a reprobate cannot stand. The name Cleveland has to go.
It is beyond my capability to come up with all the appropriate new names. So, I will offer only one suggestion. We have established the precedent in this country that two wrongs make a right. Yes, there was wrongful, systemic discrimination against minorities in the America up to the 1960s. As a remedy we created racial set asides, preferences, quotas, all just as discriminatory and just as wrong. Using this principle that two wrongs make a right, and assuming that the name Indians is, as alleged, hurtful and racist, let's call the baseball team the Palefaces. Would that be taking "the best path forward"?