The Atlanta Braves have found themselves in hot water this week after it was revealed that the baseball team plans to bring back the controversial ‘screaming Indian’ logo on their batting practice caps. The questionable design featuring a cartoonish Native American sporting a Mohawk and a feather with his mouth agape was unveiled in a blog post in ESPN. Writer Paul Lukas, of Uni Watch, said an ‘industry source’ offered him an exclusive first look at 30 MLB hat designs, among them the Braves’ latest offering, which became the sole logo to have been awarded a failing grade by Lukas.
There’s ignorant. There’s insensitive. There’s just plain racist. And then there’s whatever it is the Atlanta Braves are up to…which seems to be demonstrating a tone deaf awareness of racist imagery and its historical meaning. The Atlanta Braves will be using an old, undeniably racist logo (clue: it’s called “Screaming Savage”) on the team’s batting practice caps this season. Welcome to today’s “WTF??” moment.
You might be thinking that here in the (allegedly) enlightened 21st century, where we all try to get along, this sort of thing would never happen, COULD never happen, because no intelligent person would ever ALLOW it to happen. Sadly, you’d be wrong, because the Braves seem intent on dredging up a logo that was nothing if not a symbol of unvarnished racist stereotyping.
Evidently, the fact that the logo is called “Screaming Savage” wasn’t enough to set off alarm bells in the Braves’ front office. You’d never see the Braves using a stylized image of a slave, especially given Atlanta’s sizable African-American population. So why is doing the same thing with “Screaming Savage” any different? And if wondering how this logo was approved by the Braves’ front office, consider that the logo was also approved by Major League Baseball’s home office in New York.
Cue the (wholly justified) protests outside Turner Field from Native American groups in 4…3…2….
Just when you might have thought humanity was evolving….
