Time to retire Chief Wahoo
Time to retire Chief Wahoo
We’re supposed to be heartened by the Cleveland Indians’ announcement that the team will further reduce its use of Chief Wahoo, an offensive racial caricature that serves as its logo. But frankly, it’s hard to get excited. Given that the team acknowledges the image is odious to many people, why not just scrap it altogether?
Chief Wahoo is a grinning, red-skinned caricature of a Native American that has adorned the baseball team’s uniforms, hats and souvenirs for decades. The name derives from a 1930s comic strip laden with all sorts of stereotypes and derogatory portrayals, though the first Cleveland Indians incarnation of the image arose after World War II.
In recent years, the team has moved toward a more benign logo — a block letter “C” — yet it still puts the caricature on the players’ uniform sleeve. And the team and Major League Baseball sell mementos bearing the image, from shot glasses to watches to purses, profiting from something that they should see as an embarrassment. Team part-owner and chief executive Paul Dolan has said that he has “empathy for those who take issue with” the logo and that the team has “minimized the use of it and we’ll continue to do what we think is appropriate.” But, he adds, he has “no plans to get rid of Chief Wahoo; it is part of our history and legacy.”
At least Dolan recognizes that the logo is problematic, which puts him ahead of Washington Redskins owner Dan Snyder, who has refused to rename his football team. But it’s silly for Dolan to simultaneously acknowledge the problem and then cling to it for the sake of team history. The team, and the league, should do better, and consign this history to where it belongs: a museum.
— Los Angeles Times
Trump’s border wall payment plan in a word? Cockamamie
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump’s plan to force Mexico to pay for a 1,000-mile border wall by threatening to seize $24 billion in remittances sent annually from the U.S. to Mexico is charitably described as cockamamie. Readers will be unsurprised to learn that his proposal — outlined in a two-page memo sent to the Washington Post — builds off some dubious claims.
Here’s why it’s silly: It is a huge stretch to assume that a president could seize such remittances under the Patriot Act anti-terrorism law. The $24 billion figure doesn’t differentiate between money sent by Mexican nationals in the U.S. with legal status and those without. And then there’s the fact that it’s no longer 1975 — there are plenty of ways to transfer relatively small sums of money that would be tough to regulate, much less block. Any serious enforcement of the plan would lead to a huge boom in black-market and gray-market money-transfer schemes, in which people with legal status to make remittances could take a 1 percent fee (or less) to do so.
But it is wrong to take Trump’s proposal even this seriously. Why? Because it builds on the fundamental falsehood that America has “the moral high ground” to undertake such a hugely punitive stand against a neighboring nation with whom we have a complicated but relatively strong relationship. It’s simpleminded to see the presence of 11 million undocumented Mexican immigrants in the U.S. as Mexico’s fault. The rarely voiced secret at the heart of the immigration debate is that Republicans know their powerful Chamber of Commerce wing doesn’t even think this is a problem because it likes cheap workers.
The welcome news is that Trump’s chances for the GOP nomination, much less to win the White House, seem to be fading by the day. Good. Our short national nightmare may soon be over.
— The San Diego Union-Tribune