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USA Today is on the warpath in opposition to excessive colleges with so-called racially insensitive nicknames. In separate tales, USA Today pressured Red Mesa High School in Arizona to drop “Redskins” and Robstown Early College High School in Texas to switch the nickname “Cotton Pickers.”
There’s an enormous catch to those tales. Red Mesa is a predominantly Navajo college situated on the Navajo Reservation. Located close to the U.S.-Mexico border, Robstown is 94 p.c Hispanic or Latino. Minorities quoted within the two tales are happy with their colleges’ respective nicknames and resist politically appropriate efforts to erase them.
In the story by Analis Bailey, fourth-generation Robstown grad Bianca Prado says of Cotton Pickers, “It’s merely a label that is accurately portraying what your grandmother did.” Prado was livid over an outpouring of social media opposition to the nickname, as she believes the identify carries a way of satisfaction and admiration for migrant employees who immigrated from Mexico, beginning with her great-grandfather. “The town was built on the backs of a labor force of Hispanics that followed the production season,” Prado says.
Prado additionally mentioned that folks on social media try to make this a “Black” factor for “shock value.”
The native college district issued an announcement supporting the Cotton Pickers nickname and “sharing their reverence in the cotton-picking profession … .” The college district additionally advised USA Today the identify “represents a sense of pride based on tradition for the students and a historical legacy for the community members.”
Too dangerous. Bailey is aware of higher than the non-woke locals, writing: “To critics of the mascot, the nickname is an offensive downplaying of our country’s painful history of slavery and the forced labor of enslaved Africans, Black and Indigenous people.”
Prado counters that folks outdoors the world don’t know their historical past, and he or she says she and members of her household have all picked fruit, cotton and onions.
In the story by Greg Moore (initially posted by The Arizona Republic), he refers to Red Mesa as “a stubborn outlier” that makes use of a “racial slur against its own people” for a nickname.
Charlaine Tso, a Navajo Nation Council delegate and graduate of Red Mesa High, is quoted saying: “In the gymnasium, we have the mascot on a horse. As a source of pride and symbolism, he does raise his spear. That gesture there does say that we are strong, we are resilient, and we are going to face whatever battle or challenges that may come. … That gives us strength and positivity and hope. And I think that’s the reason some of us, the communities, cannot relate to the controversial opinion.”
Left-streamer Moore is aware of so significantly better, refuting Tso with the remark, “But this argument fails to consider the harm of cultural appropriation.”
Navajo Nation President Jonathan Nez additionally disapproves of the Redskins nickname, commenting, “For generations, this group identify and emblem has misrepresented the true historical past and occasions that outline the time period ‘redskins.’”
Moore additionally makes use of the Native American Journalists Association (NAJA) to make his case for change. Bryan Pollard, affiliate director of NAJA, mentioned, “Our position has always been that mascots are a racist epithet and harmful to native people. There’s no getting around the origin of the term and that fact that there’s a direct linkage to the genocide that was happening on this continent.”
Pollard claims that native logos on soccer helmets and basketball uniforms do large injury. Such as discrimination in schooling, racial slurs, stereotyping, “microassaults and culturally insensitive, delegitimizing and assimilative school policies and practices” and “problematic tutorial labeling and monitoring that assumes Native households and college students are poor.”
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