The organization devoted to picking nits and ignoring eye-planks with regard to universities and their “student” athletes has issued a Grand Sensitivity Edict banning the use of Indian mascots during its tournaments, on the grounds that the mascots are “abusive and offensive.” The NCAA has now cast its lot in with those who foment, in the words of Chief James E. Billie, chairman of the Seminole Tribe of Florida, in endorsing Florida State’s use of the Seminole as it mascot,
manufactured controversies that serve no purpose whatsoever, than to promote the egos of those few instigators who have assigned themselves the lofty job of telling us Seminoles how we feel.
True, the mascots are controversial at some institutions, just as mascots can be (the University of Hawaii’s logo for its “Rainbow Warriors” was controversial in a non-sensitive way, for example). And what about those Indians who take pride in the mascots, who say they’re “an honor to a great warrior people”?
Our own UNC-Pembroke got the lone exception from the NCAA. Even the sports world’s proudest assembly of self-important idiots finally comprehended the self-defeating silliness of a bunch of preening white men telling a historically Indian school’s teams they couldn’t call themselves “Braves” because they might be offending themselves.
