Time to lose Blackhawks logo
So the Thorold Blackhawks won’t be the Blackhawks for much longer. Well, sort of. Maybe. At the very least, its logo of a buffoonish “Indian chief,” replete with war paint and hair feathers, playing hockey, could soon be relegated to where it belongs — the dustbins of bad ideas.
Thorold Mayor Ted Luciani has sent the Thorold Blackhawks a letter saying that as of June 1, 2017, that logo will no longer be permitted in city-owned arenas — which happens to include the Thorold Arena, home of the Blackhawks.
Niagara politicians rarely draw such lines in the sand, so the mayor’s move is a bit of a welcomed surprise.
And it should be an utterly uncontroversial one deserving of community support.
It’s 2016. We should know better than to use demeaning sports team icons. Our First Nations brothers and sisters deserve better from us. We deserve better from ourselves.
The team says it has a new logo ready to go, although it refuses to unveil, so that could prevent a protracted political dust-up.
Encouragingly, it shows the team’s owners are at least sensitive to the issue. (Depending on what the logo is, of course)
It’s not clear if the team name will change — a total rebranding of the club is probably in order — but abandoning the logo is a step in the right direction.
As I write this, I can already sense people who are for or against the logo firing up their keyboards to blast off an angry email. Take a deep breath before you do. You might find some context useful.
The Thorold Blackhawks and minor hockey teams from the Thorold Amateur Athletic Association did not derive their name from a First Nations group called “black hawks.”
The name comes from the NHL team, the Chicago Blackhawks, which has long sported a drawing of an “Indian chief” as its logo, albeit one not nearly as racially insensitive as the one used in Thorold.
The name is tangentially derived from a single man named Black Hawk, a 19th-century leader of the Sauk Nation in the United States.
The hockey team’s first owner, Frederic McLaughlin, commanded a gun battalion in the First World War that was nicknamed “the Black Hawk division” after the Sauk leader. McLaughlin gave the team the name to honour his military unit.
So the name “Blackhawks” wasn’t intended to be an overt racial slur.
However, benign ignorance doesn’t diminish the negative impact this kind of iconography has on First Nations citizens.
Sports teams in North America have a long and sad history of using racial caricatures aimed at First Nations people.
As often as not, they portray aboriginal people as slow-witted, if fierce, warriors with sloping, CroMagnon foreheads and protruding jaws.
From the Cleveland Indians mascot Chief Wahoo to the logo of the Thorold Blackhawks, these images reflect ugly racial stereotypes that can be traced back to European colonization.
If the empathy centre of your brain is malfunctioning and you don’t understand these objections, consider your own ethnic background.
Is your family Irish? Chinese? African?
Would a team logo featuring a drunken Irish brawler, or a bucktoothed, bespectacled Asian, or a man in blackface be acceptable to you?
If your answer is “no,” then you should understand the point. If it is “yes”, you’re an awful person, and we need to have an entirely different conversation.
Some decry changing the names and icons of sports teams as political correctness meddling with tradition. But as I said back in April when Den is Morris high school dropped their nickname of “Redmen,” this isn’t about political correctness. It is about being decent human beings.
And, honestly, if your precious tradition relies on the use of flagrantly racist iconography, that tradition isn’t worth much.
It’s not clear if the team name will change — a total rebranding of the club is probably in order — but abandoning the logo is a step in the right direction.”