What's your takeaway on this?

 

Inconclusive.  It's impossible to know the exact intentions and thoughts of those that made the final selection because they are all long dead.  

 

It should also be noted that the Cleveland organization had previously honored a famous player Napolean Lajoie by naming the team the Naps. When he departed and after a disastrous season of losing they decided to change the name of the team.  Perhaps the owners realizing it was not exactly wise to tie a team directly by name to another player instead chose a more obscure generic name "Indians" to honor Sockalexis whose father was a chief from the Penobscot tribe in Maine. 

 

The Indians' official media guide says that the owners solicited sportswriters to ask fans for their favorite nickname, and the name Indians was chosen by a young girl who wrote to one of the sportswriters whose column requested suggestions. She specifically mentioned Sockalexis and his heritage.

 

It should also be noted as well that the defunct Spiders prior to 1899 for two years were sometimes called the Indians. Something Terry Pluto and Joe Posnanski omit.  They cite the Boston Braves miraculous season as reasoning behind naming the team the Indians and that it fit well with "HI-larous Native American jokes" and race-specific cliches and insults of the day, which no-one denies were plentiful back then.  

 

Wikipedia 

 

"When the Cleveland Naps changed their name to the Indians in 1915, the franchise reportedly did so to honor Sockalexis.[7] The Indians' official media guide says that the owners solicited sportswriters to ask fans for their favorite nickname, and the name Indians was chosen by a young girl who wrote to one of the sportswriters whose column requested suggestions. She specifically mentioned Sockalexis and his heritage. A brief story in the February 28, 1915, issue of the Plain Dealer states that the Cleveland Indians would wear the depiction of an Indian head on the left sleeves of their uniforms to "keep the Indians reminded of what the Braves did last year." [8] Sockalexis had died two years earlier of tuberculosis."

 

The Indians didn't adopt Chief Wahoo until 1932.

 

"The front page of the Plain Dealer featured a cartoon by Fred George Reinert that used a caricatured Native American character with a definite resemblance to the later Chief Wahoo as a stand-in for the Cleveland Indians winning an important victory. The character came to be called "The Little Indian," eventually becoming a fixture in the paper's coverage of the team, including a small front-page visual box where his head would peek out to announce the outcome of the latest game. Journalist George Condon would write in 1972, "When the baseball club decided to adopt an Indian caricature as its official symbol, it hired an artist to draw a little guy who came very close to Reinert's creation; a blood brother, unquestionably."

Edited February 7, 20188 yr by laloesch

 

Can a logo be racist without changing the meaning of racist?

I get that it can be offensive and other adjectives similar but I don't see how a logo can be racist, I believe what you are actually saying is that the Cleveland Indians organization are racists for branding their team with this logo.

One of the twins logos is a caricatures of two overweight white guys, some might find that offensive (not me).

Maybe the solution is not allow teams to have logos, or the logo has to be initials of the city or state.

The solution is to not have racist logos. It's really not that hard and kudos for Cleveland for finally figuring that out.

 

The solution is to not have racist logos. It's really not that hard and kudos for Cleveland for finally figuring that out.

The question I asked was "Can a logo be racist without changing the meaning of racist?"

If you draw a picture a picture of race with some bad stereotype, it doesn't make the picture racist if makes you a racist.  If somebody else sees the picture and says it is racist, they have changed he meaning of racist.

Webster defines racism as:

1 : a belief that race is the primary determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race
 

2 a : a doctrine or political program based on the assumption of racism and designed to execute its principles

b : a political or social system founded on racism

3 : racial prejudice or discrimination

 

A logo or piece of paper can do none of those things.

So the real answer isn't that the logo is racist it is the Cleveland baseball team is and thus MLB because they are part of that organization.

You're getting too much into the weeds. Yes, a picture can be racist and the racist caricature of Chief Wahoo is quite clearly racist.

 

I'm not sure why you'd want to get into a definition argument over this but there have been many court cases (and many more settlements) where courts and fact finders have found drawings, imagery, flyers and graffiti to be racist.