“Sticks and Stones and Sports Team Names” by Richard Estrada
When I was a kid living in Baltimore in the late 1950s, there was only one professional sports team worth following. Anyone
who ever saw the movie “Diner” knows which one it was. Back when we liked Ike, the Colts were the gods of the gridiron and
Memorial Statium was their Mount Olympus.
Ah, yes: The Colts. The Lions. Da Bears. Back when defensive tackle Big Daddy Lipscomb was letting running backs know
exactly what time it was, a young fan could easily forget that in a game where men were men, the teams they played on were
not invariably names after animals. Among others, the Packers, the Steelers, and the distant 49ers were cases in point. But in
the roll call of pro teams, one name in particular always discomfitted me: the Washington Redskins. Still, however willing I
may have been to go along with the name as a kid, as an adult I have concluded that using an ethnic group essentially as a
sports mascot is wrong.
The Redskins and the Kansas City Chiefs, along with baseball teams like the Atlanta Braves and the Cleveland Indians, should
find other names that avoid highlighting ethnicity.
By no means were such names originally meant to disparage Native Americans. The noble symbols of the Redskins or college
football’s Florida State Seminoles or the Illinois Illini are meant to be strong and proud. Yet, ultimately, the practice of using a
people as mascots is dehumanizing. It sets them apart from the rest of society. It promotes the policics of racial aggrievement at
a moment when our storehouse is running over with it.
The World Series between the Cleveland Indians and the Atlanta Braves re-ignited the debate. In the chill night air of October,
tomahawk chops and war chants suddenly became far more familiar to millions of fans, along with the ridiculous and offensive
cartoon logo of Cleveland’s “Chief Wahoo.”
The defenders of team names that use variations on the Indian theme argue that tradition should not be sacrificed at the altar of
political correctness. In truth, the nation’s No. 1 politically correct school, Stanford University, helped matters some when it
changed its team nickname from “the Indians” to “the Cardinals.” To be sure, Stanford did the right thing, but the school’s
status as “P.C. without peer” tainted the decision for those who still need to do the right thing.
Another argument is that ethnic group leaders are too inclined to cry wolf in alleging racial insensitivity. Often, this is the case.
But no one should overlook the genuine cases of political insensitivity in an attempt to avoid accusations of hypersensitivity
and political correctness.
The real world is different from the world of sports entertainment. I recently heard a father who happened to be a Native
American complain on the radio that his child was being pressured into participating in celebrations of Braves baseball. At his
kid’s school, certain days were set
Sticks and Stones and Sports Team Namesaside on which all children are told to dress in Indian garb and celebrate with
tomahawk chops and the like.
That father should be forgiven for not wanting his family to serve as somebody’s mascot. The desire to avoid ridicule is
legitimate and understandable. Nobody likes to be trivialized or deprived of their dignity. This has nothing to do with political
correctness and the provocations of militant leaders.
Against this backdrop, the decision by newspapers in Minneapolis, Seattle, and Portland to ban references to Native American
nicknames is more reasonable than some might think.
What makes naming teams after ethnic groups, particularly minorities, reprehensible is that politically impotent groups
continue to be targeted, while politically powerful ones who bite back are left alone. How long does anyone think the name
“Washington Blackskins” would last? Or how about “the New York Jews”?
With no fewer than ten Latino ballplayers on the Cleveland Indians’ roster, the team could change its name to “the Banditos.”
The trouble is they would be missing the point: Latinos would correctly object to that stereotype just as they rightly protested
against Frito-Lay’s use of the “Frito Bandito” character years ago.
It seems that what Native Americans are saying is that what would be intolerable to Jews, blacks, Latinos, and others is no less
offensive to them. Theirs is a request not only for dignified treatment but for fair treatment as well. For America to ignore the
complaints of a numerically small segment of the population because it is small is neither dignified nor fair.
“God Is God Because He Remembers,” by Elie Wiesel
I remember, May 1944: I was 15-and-a-half, and I was thrown into a haunted universe where the story of
the human adventure seemed to swing irrevocably between horror and malediction. I remember, I
remember because I was there with my father. I was still living with him there. We worked together. We
returned to the camp together. We stayed in the same block. We slept in the same box. We shared bread
and soup. Never were we so close to one another.
We talked a lot to each other, especially in the evenings, but never of death. I believed — I hoped — that
I would not survive him, not even for one day. Without saying it to him, I thought I was the last of our
line. With him, our past would die; with me, our future.
The moment the war ended, I believed — we all did — that anyone who survived death must bear
witness. Some of us even believed that they survived in order to become witnesses. But then I knew deep
down that it would be impossible to communicate the entire story. Nobody can. I personally decided to
wait, to see during ten years if I would be capable to find the proper words, the proper pace, the proper
melody, or maybe even the proper silence to describe the ineffable.
For in my tradition, as a Jew, I believe that whatever we receive we must share. When we endure an
experience, the experience cannot stay with me alone. It must be opened, it must become an offering, it
must be deepened and given and shared. And of course I am afraid that memories suppressed could come
back with a fury, which is dangerous to all human beings, not only to those who directly were participants
but to people everywhere, to the world, for everyone. So, therefore, those memories that are discarded,
shamed, somehow they may come back in different ways, disguised, perhaps seeking another outlet.
Granted, our task is to inform. But information must be transformed into knowledge, knowledge into
sensitivity, and sensitivity into commitment.
How can we therefore speak, unless we believe that our words have meaning, that our words will help
others to prevent my past from becoming another person’s — another people’s — future. Yes, our stories
are essential — essential to memory. I believe that the witnesses, especially the survivors, have the most
important role. They can simply say, in the words of the prophet, “I was there.”
What is a witness if not someone who has a tale to tell and lives only with one haunting desire: to tell it.
Without memory, there is no culture. Without memory, there would be no civilization, no society, no
future.
After all, God is God because he remembers.
“Egg Factory,” by Verlyn Klinkenborg
On Friday, most of the country’s major newspapers, including The Times, featured reports from a small
town called Clarion, Iowa. Just outside Clarion are the egg operations, owned by the DeCoster family, at
the heart of the salmonella outbreak. The factory — no point calling it a farm — called Wright County
Egg, is the source of 380 million of the more than 500 million recalled eggs.
I grew up in Clarion. My family lived there from 1954 to 1963 during what now looks like a golden era
for American farming. When I was back a couple of years ago, I noted the most evident change, a
significant population of Mexican workers. I hoped that they were able to love Clarion as much as I did.
It’s unlikely, because I also saw where they worked.
When I was young, I thought I grasped the immensity of the Iowa landscape. The immensity of the
soybean and corn fields has only grown because so many smaller farms have vanished as a result of
government farm policy, which rewards economic concentration. As I turned off Highway 3 east of town,
I saw that there was a newer immensity, the egg factories — an endless row of faceless buildings, as
bland as a compound of colossal storage units but with the air of a prison.
It wasn’t simply that the operation is out of scale with the Iowa landscape. It is out of scale with any
landscape, except perhaps the industrial districts of Los Angeles County. What shocked me most was the
thought that this is where the logic of industrial farming gets us. Instead of people on the land, committed
to the welfare of the agricultural enterprise and the resources that make it possible, there was this horror
— a place where millions of chickens are crowded in tiny cages and hundreds of laborers work in dire
conditions.
It takes only a little investigation to learn how bad things have been inside those buildings. The list of
offenses for which the DeCosters and their farms have been fined in Iowa and Maine only begins with
hiring children and illegal immigrants.
In 2000, Jack DeCoster, the operations’ founder, was named a “habitual violator” of Iowa’s
environmental laws. His egg factories have been cited by OSHA for deplorable working conditions. In
2003, Mr. DeCoster paid more than $1.5 million to settle an employment discrimination suit charging that
11 women working in the Clarion plants had been subject to sexual harassment, including rape and threats
of retaliation. There have been nearly 1,500 illnesses as a result of the salmonella outbreak. Every one of
the billions of eggs produced this way has been tainted.
“Finding Prosperity by Feeding Monkeys,” by Harold Taw
I could say that I believe in America because it rewarded my family’s hard work to overcome poverty. I
could say that I believe in holding on to rituals and traditions because they helped us flourish in a new
country. But these concepts are more concretely expressed this way: I believe in feeding monkeys on my
birthday — something I’ve done without fail for 35 years.
When I was born, a blind, Buddhist monk living alone in the Burmese jungle predicted that my birth
would bring great prosperity to the family. To ensure this prosperity, I was to feed monkeys on my
birthday.
While this sounds superstitious, the practice makes karmic sense. On a day normally given over to
narcissism, I must consider my family and give nourishment to another living creature. The monk never
meant for the ritual to be a burden. In the Burmese jungle, monkeys are as common as pigeons. He
probably had to shoo them away from his sticky rice and mangoes. It was only in America that feeding
monkeys meant violating the rules.
As a kid, I thought that was cool. I learned English through watching bad television shows and I felt like
Caine from Kung Fu, except I was the chosen warrior sent to defend my family. Dad and I would go to
the zoo early in the morning, just the two of us. When the coast was clear, I would throw my contraband
peanuts to the monkeys.
I never had to explain myself until my 18th birthday. It was the first year I didn’t go with my father. I
went with my friends and arrived 10 minutes after the zoo gates closed.
“Please,” I beseeched the zookeeper, “I feed monkeys for my family, not for me. Can’t you make an
exception?”
“Go find a pet store,” she said.
If only it were so easy. That time, I got lucky. I found out that a high school classmate trained the
monkeys for the movie Out of Africa, so he allowed me to feed his monkey. I’ve had other close calls.
Once a man with a pet monkey suspected that my story was a ploy — that I was an animal rights activist
out to liberate his monkey. Another time, a zoo told me that outsiders could not feed their monkeys
without violating the zookeepers’ collective bargaining agreement. In a pet store once, I managed to feed
a marmoset being kept in a birdcage. Another time, I was asked to wear a biohazard suit to feed a
laboratory monkey.
It’s rarely easy and, yet, somehow I’ve found a way to feed a monkey every year since I was born.
Our family has prospered in America. I believe that I have ensured this prosperity by observing our family
ritual and feeding monkeys on my birthday. Do I believe that literally? Maybe. But I have faith in our
family and I believe in honoring that faith in anyway I can.