Diversity at Work

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What others are saying about Native mascots: Rejecting Racism: The Native Factor (Poynter Online) What's in a (Nick)name? (Poynter Online) The road to becoming Seminoles (FSView & Florida Flambeau) Let's get a grip on mascot bans (The Sun News, Myrtle Beach, S.C.) NCAA Joins Political Correctness Nickname Debate (The Ledger Independent, Maysville, Ky.) Rethinking Indian Mascots (The Christian Science Monitor) Political correctness slants NCAA policy (The News-Sun, Kendalville, Ind.) NCAA begins backpedaling on misguided mascot ruling (The Atlanta Journal-Constitution) Mascot ban helps, but Indians face bigger issues(The Indianapolis Star) Local tribes tolerant of Native nicknames (Norwich Bulletin, Norwich, Conn.) Indian mascots just aren't sporting (The Des Moines Register, Des Moines, Iowa) Indian mascots affect more than sports (The Navajo Times) Animals are mascots -- Seminole Indians are symbols (Florida State Times) Interested in diversity? Check out our diversity seminars. Sign up to receive Journalism with a Difference by e-mail: * Click here (sent Tuesdays)

Not long after I traded in a decade of sports writing for the right to cheer again at football games, I took a trip with a friend to Baton Rouge for a fanatic's fix: the Fighting Tigers of LSU were taking on the Florida State Seminoles.

There's little to compare to Saturday afternoon football for pure tradition and unbridled exuberance; little to surpass the electricity that surges through Tiger Stadium when the LSU trombone section pumps out the first four notes of "Hold That Tiger."

But the Seminoles were on top this day, and their fans, many splattered with garnet and gold war paint, had their own traditions. They sang along as the band played the traditional war chant of the FSU Seminoles:

Ohhhhhh, oh oh-uh-uh ohhhhh
Oh-uh-uh-ohhhhh
Oh-uh-uh-ohhhhh

As they chanted, they did their traditional "tomahawk chop," whereby they brought their forearms up and down to demonstrate how their fierce namesakes would slice up enemies.

It's wrong to use Native Americans as mascots. It's wrong to use them in the newspaper or on the air. In our corner of the stadium, hundreds of beer-ed up young LSU fans mimicked the arm movements, except they used two arms and, in the tradition of beer-ed up young men, their modified "chop" simulated masturbation.

Thus the tradition of the Seminole tribe was honored.

We are back here again in the infuriating debate over whose tradition is worth honoring; whether it's homage or insult to turn a people into a mascot. The NCAA, in a brash move to strong-arm member schools into giving up Native American names and symbols, has ruled that 18 universities must drop or conceal their nicknames and mascots if they hope to host some of the league's biggest games.

While the predictable hysterics play out in the sports pages and on talk radio, I hope editors and news directors will use the moment to look again at their complicity in this holdover from a bigoted past. I hope they'll take their fingers out of the wind and their heads out of the sand and take a stand.

It's wrong to use Native Americans as mascots. It's wrong to use them in the newspaper or on the air.

In defense of perpetuating this practice in the press we now hear a familiar litany: It's impractical to take nicknames off the table. It's more accurate to call the teams what they call themselves. And isn't this just political correctness?

Practically speaking, making a change is easy. English is a generous language for anyone interested in thinking a little. How does it look in practice? Well, the Orlando Sentinel, which apparently doesn't mind using Native nicknames, recently wrote a whole article about Florida State's football team without using "Seminoles" once -- at least not in the story.

The harm here is not that all Indian nicknames are insults on the order of Washington's Redskins. Newspapers in Lincoln, Neb., and Portland, Ore., somehow manage to cover sports thoroughly, though by policy they avoid using Indian nicknames. The Star Tribune of Minnesota once stood against these stereotypes until a new editor decided that by leaving the names out, the paper was being inaccurate.

The problem with that argument is that it presents accuracy versus sensitivity as a zero-sum game, a journalistic absolute, and it is neither. It never has been.

Take this example: We may report that a man "suffered head injuries" in a traffic accident. That's accurate. Or, we may say that "a huge gash was opened just below the left temporal lobe of the brain and small portions of brain matter were scattered on the asphalt." That, too, is accurate. It's just that the second one's likely to hurt many people, not least among them the family of the person on the pavement.

Every day, most news organizations choose the first description. Most days, journalists make such news judgments to provide as much truth as possible while doing as little harm as is necessary. That's not merely a sleight of professional semantics. It's the cornerstone of ethical decision-making.

The harm here is not that all Native American nicknames are insults on the order of Washington's Redskins. It's that nearly all of them freeze Native Americans in an all-encompassing, one-dimensional pose: the raging, spear-wielding, bareback-riding, cowboy-killing, woo-woo-wooing warriors this country has caricatured, demonized, and tried mightily to exterminate.

So impressed by the indomitable spirit of The Indian were schools like Florida State, we are now to believe, that they appropriated their name (at a time when, surely, they wanted nothing to do with actual Indians), invented a likeness, and now send a horse-borne student galloping across a football field before a tomahawking crowd in the name of honor and respect.

The irony takes my breath away.

Here in Florida, where "rancorous debate" is a redundancy and "Schiavo" is a verb ("to exploit for political gain"), no less than the governor has declared the NCAA policy the work of renegades. He, like the hyperbolic president of Florida State University and the columnists who support them, huff on about the blessing the school has gotten from the Florida tribe and the great Seminole tradition FSU honors.

But you don't have to scratch Chief Osceola's war paint very long to know that it's not Native American tradition under there. What's really at stake is the tradition of the alumni at the likes of Florida State, Alcorn State and Southeastern Oklahoma State (home of the "Savages"), all desperate to hold onto their rituals, their trademarks and their hot-selling T-shirts. Thus, they retrofit arrogance with honor, just as their ancestors might have sprinkled spices on rotting meat.

Many sports writers and editorialists have pounced upon the NCAA for describing the mascots as "hostile and abusive" symbols. They've parsed the language, debated the logic, decried the timing.

Have at that. In the end, though, it's little more than dodging mirrors. For the time will come when journalists will still have to account for the logic of writing "n-----" for one slur while they continue to write "Redskins" or "Savages" as though the roots of those words are any less nourished by bigotry and bloodshed.

Stop using these nicknames in your stories. Learn the history. Listen past the rationalizations. Find a place to stand that is grounded not in policy, but in principle. Let that be the tradition that guides your journalism the next time you see the face of Chief Wahoo.