Carmelo Anthony calls on 6 teams to drop Native American names, including Warriors

[tulipsandroses]

17. I'm not following your logic about him being a spokesperson. By that measure, no one of any other

race, sexual orientation, religion, etc should speak up for what they think is a wrong.

Context in this case is important. I doubt Carmelo was thinking about the use of the term as it applies to the entire English language. Moreso, the history of its racist use in sports. I don't think we all are having the same conversation here.

That’s because Warriors, as a mascot in sports, has a long history of employing Native American tropes. Marquette University retired its “Willie Wampum” mascot in 1971 but kept Warriors as the team name until 1994, when it switched to Golden Eagles.

The NBA’s Philadelphia Warriors were born in 1946 and for decades used a cartoon rendering of an American Indian as their logo. When the franchise moved to San Francisco, in 1962, the team name remained but the logo changed to a blue headdress.


][link:[link:https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/nfl/redskins/2020/07/08/washington-new-nfl-team-name-warriors-is-non-starter/5389663002/

The above article was about renaming that team in Washington. The writer wanted to emphasize not going from one racist name to using another name with a racist history in sports.

Interestingly
This writer went on to make the argument that it was OK for Golden State to use this name, because they and other NBA teams had ditched their disrespectful images and had several different logos over the years including the golden gate bridge. I'm probably reaching, but I get the feeling the writer was implying that the NBA had already done the work moving away from these disrespectful symbols.

I'm posting these articles so people can see context and history and see that he's not just pulling stuff out of his ass. You can still disagree with him, given the context.

(This article below is actually from a few years ago, funny you would think it was written just recently)

Sports, Like The Rest Of The U.S., Still Struggles With Legacy Of Racism

Let me illustrate with the history of my own university. The sports teams at Marquette University have had a number of nicknames down through the decades. They were the Hilltoppers for a while. (Lame!). From 1911 until '54, the football team came to be known as The Golden Avalanche. (Cool! Also, that particular moniker lent itself to a legendary campus dive that didn’t close until 1997.) Finally, in 1954, the school settled on calling its teams The Warriors, and they were represented by a papier-mâché-headed mock Native American named Willie Wampum. Beginning in 1961, this grotesque cavorted on the sidelines at Marquette basketball games for a decade. By the early '70’s, however, with student activism at high tide and the American Indian Movement beginning to strengthen itself all over the Midwest, Fr. James Groppi, a prominent Milwaukee activist, began a campaign to retire Willie Wampum, who was placed into storage—God knows where—in 1971. The school maintained the Warriors name, even briefly employing an actual Native American student at the games, until 1993, when it rather lost its mind for a brief moment.

For some reason, the university decided to drop Warriors entirely, replacing it with the Marquette Golden Eagles. There was a rather universal outrage among students and alumni. (After all, a Warrior could be anything, from a Viking chieftain to an Ostrogoth.) Eleven years later, the student body tried one last time to bring back the Warriors. The university’s trustees resisted and, in one of the worst PR blunders in the history of college athletics, changed the name of the teams to the Marquette Gold, which sounded less like an athletic program, and more like a particularly strong brand of marijuana. Outrage and mockery descended in equal measure. They brought back Golden Eagles, and that was the end of it.

My point is that organized sports have been wrestling with this profound question in public for longer than the political world has
][link:https://sports.yahoo.com/sports-rest-u-still-struggles-011816788.html|