Maria Givens publishes piece in Vox on Native Mascots
Maria Givens, TPS Co Founder, published a First Person piece in Vox about her experience working on Native Mascots.
To read the full piece, check out the article in Vox.
An excerpt is below.
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“But in the past year, the Washington Football Team (name still TBD) and now the Cleveland team have toppled like dominoes. A change this big could have only happened during a time when the country has shifted toward a reckoning with racism. The George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020 led to people buying anti-racist books in droves, to corporations adopting diversity initiatives for the first time, to serious conversations about race on TV shows and at dinner tables. Polls in the summer of 2020 showed that 67 percent of Americans acknowledged that racism is a big problem in society.
Still, people have a hard time understanding racism when it is not tied to violence or economics. Racism tied to perception is the hardest to unpack.
Everyone likes to think that their perceptions are fair and unbiased. It’s tough enough for people to admit that they have privilege in a racist system. It’s even harder to convince people that the blinders from that racist system have taught them to see others as less than human.
The discussion becomes not about what we see — we all see a red cartoon character in a baseball cap — it is about how we see. I see Wahoo as a caricature of who society wants me to be — stuck in the past and almost extinct — ignoring who I really am: an educated Native American woman, proud of the people I come from, living in 2021. The lobbyist at the reception saw Wahoo as an honor to a dying race of people who have bigger problems than changing his perception.
But changing perception matters. Changing perception puts pressure on institutions to do better. If Americans had always seen Native people as humans, we would have never had to fight these mascot battles. We could have actually focused all of our attention on rebuilding our communities.”
