Wahoo

Every time the Cleveland Indians baseball club makes it to the playoffs, a sense of unease sets in with the euphoria. It’s only a matter of days, if not minutes, from the time they step into the national spotlight before broadcasters or bloggers or commenters will decry the “racism” of the Indians name or, more pointedly, the team’s icon, Chief Wahoo. The excellent Salon columnist King Kaufman lasted the entire Yankees series and most of the Red Sox series before he could hold it in no longer and he popped.

I wrote a letter in response. Here is it, with a few typos fixed.

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Thanks for reminding me how racist I am

I grew up in Cleveland in a large family where playing baseball was the family passion (I’m this close to saying “the family religion”). I loved the Indians, terrible as they were throughout the sixties and seventies and eighties. Chief Wahoo was simply part of the landscape. I don’t think I loved him. He was just there. In the case of the huge revolving Chief Wahoo at the old stadium, he was really there.

I was also interested in Indians as a kid—the real ones, some of whom lived in northeast Ohio at one time and left their names for things scattered all over the place: Cuyahoga, Geauga, Conneaut, Ashtabula, etc., etc. I don’t know if there was a connection between my interest in the baseball Indians and the phantom Indians. I read a lot of books about Indians and kept my eye peeled for arrowheads in the woods. That’s all I know.

Be that as it may, as a liberal – progressive – socialist – humanitarian – internationalist white guy, I have at times felt ill-at-ease with Chief Wahoo. On balance, I wish he would retire. The problem is, he doesn’t seem to age, and he looks so damn happy. I have noticed how the Indians front office has been downplaying the image in recent years. But of the millions of people who buy Indians gear, a certain percentage actually buys the stuff not in spite of the image but because of it. They are so benighted, aren’t they? What is wrong with these people?

But here’s the funny part (if you have a sense of humor, which most people outside of Cleveland don’t when it comes to Chief Wahoo). A few years ago I happened to be talking on the phone with someone in Maine, someone I’d never met, a guy who wanted to offer his web design services to my organization in northern Virginia (I live in Washington, DC). In passing I asked about the Penobscot tribe. He seemed surprised. He asked how I knew about them, and so on. I must’ve mentioned I’m from Cleveland, and somehow or other the Indians and their mascot came up (maybe it was 1997, a bittersweet year for Indians fans). I expressed my embarrassment about Chief Wahoo before we returned to the business at hand.

A few weeks later this guy in Maine sent me an e-mail saying how he had come across some Indians (the real ones) wearing the Cleveland Indians cap with Chief Wahoo. He asked them about it, and they said they love Chief Wahoo. They actually seemed to appreciate that there was a Major League baseball team called the Indians—that someone actually remembers that Indians exist, that they, in fact, had the run of the continent for centuries. Would they also have said, “Hey, white man, lighten up! You think Indians don’t laugh? You don’t think Indians appreciate a caricature? You think Indians are that touchy and soft and perpetually down-at-the-mouth?” They didn’t say that, as far as I know. They just wore the hats and said they liked them. Are they “self-hating Indians”? I wouldn’t like to assume that. Are they idiots? or fools? Hmm—I think it would be a bit racist to think that, don’t you?

As I said, if Chief Wahoo won’t ride off into the sunset on his own, I personally would like to see the Indians management give him more than a little nudge. But I don’t pretend to speak for anyone else. And I hope to see the Indians finish off the Red Sox and beat the Rockies. Not scalp them—just out-hit, out-run, out-pitch, and out-field them on the diamond. And I hope everyone, starting with King Kaufman, can keep their pain (which I’m sure is heartfelt) at seeing Chief Wahoo from billowing forth in phrases like “outrageously racist” and easy but misleading comparisons to minstrelsy. I, too, wish fans wouldn’t paint their faces like Chief Wahoo. But then, I wish they wouldn’t paint their faces at all. Or their flabby stomachs. I wish the loud music would go, and that people would watch the game—the indescribably beautiful game of baseball—with their undivided attention. Obviously I’m an old fart.

Perhaps some especially sensitive commentators can keep in mind that the presumably racist city of Cleveland happened to field the first black player in the American League and the first black manager in the major leagues (leaving aside that the white population of Cleveland helped elect the first black mayor of a major US city, that the college in nearby Oberlin was the first to regularly admit African-American students [back in 1835], and so on). If, every time the Indians claw their way to first place in their division and step onto the national stage, Chief Wahoo makes intelligent people like King Kaufman think the people of Cleveland are more racist than those who live in Chicago, or Boston, or Los Angeles, or [name a tiny town somewhere in the heartland], then that is the best reason for killing him. Not because you happen to think he offends Indians, or because he offends you (and makes you feel strangely good being offended), but because Cleveland gets a black eye, in what should be a deliriously happy time, over a silly cartoon—an Indian who’s giddy with the pleasure of competing and emerging victorious over a pair of socks, or an entire mountain range.