Chief Wahoo Shrinking?

[vls]

Acutally, you're talking to someone who loves powder blue roads (depending on the team) and whose favorite logo of all time is the notorious ball in glove. I just never cared for Chief Wahoo because I think it's a poor design (on top of the obvious racial connotations... being that my mother is half Menomonee).

I'm with Ilwauk. Two points are simply incontrovertible here:

1. Chief Wahoo is a racist cartoon.

2. Pretty much nobody intends to communicate anti-Indian bigotry by displaying Chief Wahoo.

I mean, can you imagine any parent allowing her child to go to school wearing a cap or a shirt with the equivalent non-Indian racist caricature on it? A real Sambo-faced, big-lipped, nappy-headed negro, or a bucktoothed, slanty-eyed oriental, or what have you? Absolutely not. No decent person would do such a thing, but Chief Wahoo gets an exception. Which isn't necessarily the worst thing; we have all kinds of hypocritical double-standards in polite society, and quite often hypocrisy is better than the alternative. But to deny that Chief Wahoo is a racist cartoon is to deny that this is too:

The difference being that it is almost inconceivable that any non-bigot would actually wear a Sambo head on his person.

But Ilwauk seconds an important line of thought that is very much open to productive debate regarding the design quality of Chief Wahoo. Personally, I think it's a terrific cap design, but only if it's used in a maximally over-the-top manner. The giant Chief Wahoo of yore ("yore" extends to the early 1990s, right?) was great precisely because its exceptionally large size displayed a degree of institutional self-depreciation. Combined with the overall generic crappiness of Cleveland's uniforms at the time, the giant Chief Wahoo always looked to me like the team was using it in fun, sort of saying, "Yeah, yeah, we know, but this is the best logo we've got, and if it makes us look like clowns, then fine, this is a game and we're here to have fun, so screw it, let's play ball." Something along those lines.

But when the team shrunk Chief Wahoo to normal cap-logo size (and then outlined it in freakin' silver!) it communicated that it was taking the logo Very Seriously. As currently proportioned, Cleveland's caps send a message more like, "Chief Wahoo is a sacred insignia, like Detroit's D or New York's Tiffany NY, and you will respect our authority -- now pay us your money and sit your ass down."

My personal wish has always been to see Chief Wahoo retired from the uniforms in favor of something along these lines:

Only, you know, made with actual design skill.

That, or expand Chief Wahoo back to his former absurdly large size, with the feather curving over the top of the front panel, which to me shows a degree of irony that mitigates the logo's inherent social problem. There's just something defensive, almost passive-aggressive, about today's shrunken Chief Wahoo that tells me that the team is not so much having fun with an anachronistic logo but rather asserting a political position.

Anyway, the point is that use and context matter, and that I agree with Ilwauk that Cleveland could do much better than Chief Wahoo, from a pure design point of view, whatever one thinks of the politics of the logo. In the end, that's why I'm a fan of the NCAA's position: Regardless of the political and social implications, most of the NCAA's Indian-themed school mascots were examples of lazy design, so forcing the schools in question to change offered a chance for improved sports design. Now if only we could do the same for all the high school teams named after birds of prey ...

I really like the first one. All red looks great.

Maybe you should do a concept....

[ShinyHubCaps]

You reeeeeally didn't need to quote that whole thing.

[powersurge]

but it still plays on a stereotype that all Irish people are violent and prone to fighting so why is it any different?

First off, this is overly common and weak argument against the notion that the Chief Wahoo logo is racist.

Secondly, how many true full blooded Irishmen or woman have you met in your life? I've personally met quite a few actually....probably about 40-50 to be more exact.

Now how many true full blooded Native American people have you met in your life? I've met NONE. I've met certain percentages (1/16, 1/8, 1/4), the greatest being half, but never full blooded. The main reason for that is that a great majority of those peoples were killed off in the 'Great Western Colonization', or live apart from the rest of us in reservations across the country.

My point? Comparing what the Irish immigrants went through to the Native American peoples is like comparing apples to oatmeal. Not an accurate or even fair comparison. That being said, whether or not the Fighting Irish logo is racist or not does not change the fact that the Chief Wahoo character is insulting and racist.

The Wahoo face has RED skin, a feather in it's head dress, and big smiling white teeth. Its like they are trying to make the image of a proud Chief look cartooney and cute. Its like "Hey, we nearly wiped out you kind from your land, and if thats not enough we're kind of playing the whole thing off as cute and funny by having this stereotypical goofy looking Chief logo"

Its just not right. Just because you grew up your whole life with this logo and think its a 'classic'....it doesn't make it right.

[hecticbro]

What about an Irishman decked out in green with his fists cocked and ready to brawl (like the Irish are stereotyped for doing)? I'm not crying rape and acting offended, but I'm wondering why it's any different. The Irish are an ethnic group, just as Native Americans, Blacks, or Asians are ethnic groups.

The problem with that argument is that Notre Dame's logo does not depict an Irishman. That is an Irish leprechaun. Leprechauns are always ready to brawl (to protect their gold) and since they are mythical creatures, there's not really anybody out there to be offended.

If ND wanted to depict an Irishman, they would have a logo of a fat drunk redhead swinging an empty bottle as a weapon.

P.S. - I've seen real live Indians wearing Chief Wahoo hats more often than anyone else who isn't a Cleveland fan.

[dt0999]

A team logo developed from a newspaper cartoon depicting the Indians is too cartooney? I still don't see how a caricature of an Indian is offensive. If you removed all the stereotypes from the cartoon he wouldn't look Native American.

The team is not propagating stereotypes anymore than using a tomahawk or that seminole spear thingy.

The maroon color used for the Washington Redskins is dark enough to non offensive, but the red used for the Indians crosses the line. I think the Chief Whaoo's blue feather is offensive. I mean, when have you EVER seen a feather that big and blue? That's ridiculous.

I am all about not deliberately offending someone based on stereotypes. I would like to see some good examples of Native American caricatures that would generally be deemed non-offensive and would be appropriate fro a sports team logo.

Thanks in advance.