critical philosophy of race, vol. 4, no. 1, 2016 Copyright © 2016 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA Abstract An account of the specific ill of Native American mascots-that is, the particular racism of using Native Americans as mascots, as distinct from other racist portrayals of Native Americans-requires a fuller account of the function of mascots as such than has previously been offered. By analyzing the history of mascots in the United States, this article argues that mascots function as symbols that draw into an artificial unity 1) a variety of teams existing over a period of time and thereby 2) a community of individuals who are thus able to use that team as their own symbolic locus of unification. This unification of teams and their concomitant communities is accomplished by appeal to a symbol that facilitates a particular fantasy of collective identity. The usage of Native American mascots is racist not only because it involves stereotypical portrayals of Native Americans, but (more specifically) because it treats Native persons simply as a means to symbolic unification-and not, importantly, as members of the community they thus serve. In other words, in these cases mascots work as unifying signifiers erin c. tarver Oxford College of Emory University on the particular racism of native american mascots 96 ■ critical philosophy of race precisely by being the purely instrumental facilitator of a group's collective fantasy of itself. Keywords: Native American mascots, mascots and racism, race and sports, racism in the United States The residents of Ossining pride themselves on living in an "ethnically diverse" community. One of the threads that bind the community is attending Ossining schools and representing the Ossining Indians. I feel that the use of the Indian mascot unites Ossining. The Forrest Hills Board of Education voted 5–0 on July 19 to retain the Anderson High School Redskins mascot, because of the overwhelming support shown by students, parents, teachers and members of the community. It was made clear to the board that the Redskins mascot belongs to the students and alumni of Anderson, and that it will not be given up because of pressure or intimidation from outside groups such as the American Indian Movement. -Letters to the Editor by supporters of Native American mascots, quoted in Silva 2007. Emphasis mine. This is a paper about mascots. It is, in one way, a paper about mascots and race-specifically, about what makes certain types of mascots racist. But it is also about mascots and social ontology-that is, about what a mascot is, how mascot-like symbols function, and about their role in the metaphysics of teams. This paper addresses both of these things because it seems to me that one cannot adequately account for the specific ill of using Native Americans as mascots without considering the function of mascots more generally. One could, of course, offer compelling arguments that demonstrate the racist status of Native American mascots insofar as these are instances of the dissemination of stereotypical or derogatory images of Native Americans, as Ward Churchill (2003) and others have done, or demonstrate the psychological harm caused by these images for Native persons, as Fryberg (2008) has done. Such work is important, and arguably correct in its assessment of the imagery of Native Americans that sports teams with Native American mascots reinforce. What this work does not do-indeed, does not aim to do-is to explain what is different about the 97 ■ erin c. tarver usage of such images of Native Americans as mascots, as distinct from their usage in film, books, and so on. I will argue in what follows that an account of this specific ill-that is, the specific problems of using Native Americans as mascots-requires a fuller account of the function of mascots as such. In this paper, I aim to offer just such an account. My argument will thus have implications not only for the ethical debate about Native American mascots, but also, as I will explain, for a central metaphysical question in the philosophy of sport. Though the adoption of sports team mascots has been a ubiquitous practice in North America for some time, little philosophical work has addressed mascots' general significance, symbolic or social functions. The vast majority of the theoretical work that exists on mascots-in either Philosophy or the social sciences-takes up the task of arguing about the ethics of Native American mascots, and (in general) defending the claim that the usage of Native American mascots is indefensibly racist. This conclusion is, I believe, the correct one. It is curious, however, that so many people have defended the claim that such mascots are racist without carefully defining what a mascot is in the first place. Now, to be fair, it's not true that no one in the anti-Native-Mascot camp has considered this problem. Those who have done so, however, have often been arguing from highly contestable or even false premises, which do not systematically investigate the usages or functions of actually existing mascots. If we are going to reject team names like "the Redskins"-and I think we should-then let us do it on sound grounds. The grounds we need require a philosophical investigation of the use of mascots as such-its purpose and function as a symbolic practice existing within a particular social/historical context. In what follows, I will argue that mascots function as signifiers that draw into an artificial unity 1) a variety of teams existing over a period of time and thereby 2) a community of individuals who are thus able to use that team as their own symbolic locus of unification. My argument will proceed as follows: first, I will clarify my usage of the term 'mascot' and analyze some data on actually existing mascots in order to explain why we ought to reject the dominant arguments against Native American mascots. Next, drawing on the thought of John Searle, I will suggest that mascots are better understood as contributing to the constitution of something than merely describing or symbolizing it. Third, through a brief historical investigation of the evolution of professional sports mascots, I will argue that the unification of teams and their concomitant communities is 98 ■ critical philosophy of race accomplished by appeal to a symbol that facilitates a particular fantasy of collective identity. Thus, the usage of Native American mascots is racist, I will argue, not only because it involves stereotypical portrayals of Native Americans, but (more specifically) because it treats Native persons simply as a means to symbolic unification-and not, importantly, as members of the community they thus serve. In other words, in these cases mascots work as unifying signifiers precisely by being the purely instrumental facilitator of a group's collective fantasy of itself. "Mascots," "Racism," and the Problems of Previous Accounts In this section, I want to offer some terminological clarifications, and set out some data that supports the claims I have made about the inadequacy of previous accounts of mascots. First, when I refer to mascots, I have in mind a collection of related practices, some of which could be called by different names, depending on one's particular purposes. Often, for example, people distinguish between a team's nickname-say, the "Tigers"-and its mascot-say, "Mike the Tiger." Or, more controversially, we might distinguish between the nickname "Illini" and the mascot "Chief Illiniwek." Now, there are good reasons for making this distinction. One might argue, as the NCAA did, that the portrayal of Chief Illiniwek by a white student "playing Indian" is more ethically objectionable than the simple use of a nickname associated with Native Americans (NCAA 2005). However, I will not maintain this distinction here. The reason for this is twofold: first, in most cases, it is quite tricky to maintain a clear dividing line between nicknames and their idealized material instantiations. On what side of the boundary, for example, do official team logos bearing physical representations of the nickname fall? The second, more important reason is that (as I will argue) these practices of naming and physically representing a name have, in the case of sports fandom, the same symbolic function and effects. Thus, statements against the usage of Native American imagery by sports teams have treated "mascots," "images," "iconography," "nicknames" "symbols" "logos," "personalities" and "artifice" as equivalent, and as subject to the same censure (NAACP 1999, National Congress of American Indians 1993, US Commission on Civil Rights 2001, Five Civilized Tribes Intertribal Council 2001, American Psychological Association 2005). Whether a name is spelled out on a uniform or symbolically instantiated by a plush representation, the ostensible 99 ■ erin c. tarver purpose is to represent the particular team with which it is associated. Following both pragmatic and poststructuralist accounts of meaning, then, I am suggesting that we understand names and mascots as part of a constellation of practices that give rise to a particular social effect-and thus that they are not meaningfully distinct for my present purposes (even if there may be other purposes for which such a distinction could be usefully maintained). So, unless I note otherwise, when I refer to a team's "mascot," I am referring both to the various forms of iconography that represent it (whether in two-dimensional depictions, human or humanoid costumes, or uniforms symbolic of it). I am choosing to foreground the mascot feature of these practices, rather than the nickname, the colors, or something else, because it makes these practices salient as a system of symbols that relies on idealized representations of the things they purport merely to signify, which, I will suggest, is important for their functionality. Second, I am following Paul C. Taylor in using "racism" in a broad sense that includes any form of disregard for persons of a particular race. Defining racism in this way, according to Taylor, includes "the withholding of respect, concern, good-will, or care from the members of a race," (Paul C. Taylor 2013, 32) leaving open the possibility that such withholding may be intentional or unintentional, and located primarily in the consequences of actions and practices or in the consciousness of individual agents. I thus allow that racism may take a variety of forms, and be a characteristic of a variety of entities, including "people, actions, beliefs, practices, institutions, and attitudes" (34). Consequently, in order to demonstrate that the usage of Native American mascots is racist, I do not believe that I need to show that, say, a particular fan of the Atlanta Braves intends to ridicule Native Americans when she or he performs the "Tomahawk Chop." It will, instead, be enough to show that the usage of the "Braves" mascot ( including the "Tomahawk Chop," and other associated symbolism) involves disregard for Native Americans. With these terminological clarifications in mind, I will briefly address the data behind my rejection of at least some of the arguments that have been made about Native American mascots to date. To compile this current data, I examined the mascots used in the four major professional "revenue sports" leagues in the United States: the National Football League, Major League Baseball, the National Basketball Association and the National Hockey League.1 When looking closely at the types of professional sports mascots currently in use,2 it is clear that although one 100 ■ critical philosophy of race might suggest that nonhuman animals constitute a plurality of mascots today (depending on our classificatory schema), this menagerie is, to the contrary of claims made by some of the most well known opponents of Native American mascots (King and Springwood 2001, 55–56), far from the majority.3 Indeed, nonhuman animals represent less than one third of all major league sports mascots in the United States. There are, in fact, more human figures used as mascots-even excepting the special case of Native American mascots for comparative reasons-than there are animals. Although this ratio does differ from sport to sport, even football, which has the highest percentage of animal mascots, features animal mascots for slightly less than fifty percent of its teams. At the college level, where nonhuman animal mascots are more prevalent than at the professional level, they still comprise only about half of current college mascots. It is thus difficult to sustain the claim that Native American mascots simply treat Native Americans as animals-or, at least, it is difficult without significant supplemental argumentation. table 1 types of mascots in major us sports leagues, 2013 All Major US Sports Animals 40 Persons by Occupation 30 Persons by Location 11 Natural Objects/Phenomena 12 Human-created objects 7 Native Americans 5 Clothing Color 4 Mythical Persons 4 Supernatural beings 3 Arts 3 Other ethnic groups 2 Individual Names 1 Total Mascots 122 Football Animals 15 Persons by Occupation/Activity 8 101 ■ erin c. tarver Mythical Persons 3 Native Americans 2 Human-created objects 1 Persons by Location 1 Individual Names 1 Supernatural beings 1 Total Mascots 32 Basketball Animals 8 Persons by Occupation/Activity 8 Human-created objects 5 Natural objects/phenomena 4 Persons by location 2 Human arts 2 Ethnic groups 1 Total Mascots 30 Baseball Persons by Occupation/Activity 9 Animals 8 Persons by Location 5 Clothing Color 3 Native Americans 2 Mythical Persons 1 Supernatural Beings 1 Natural Objects/Phenomena 1 Total Mascots 30 Hockey Animals 8 Persons by Occupation/Activity 5 Natural Phenomena 5 Persons by Location 3 Human-created objects 2 Natural Objects 2 102 ■ critical philosophy of race Native Americans 1 Supernatural beings 1 Clothing color 1 Human arts 1 Other Ethnic Groups 1 Total Mascots 30 It is also important to consider the breakdown of the types of persons who are used as mascots. Philosopher Peter Lindsay has argued that, when humans who are not Native Americans are used as mascots, these references are to specific human groups that do not exist any longer (such as Vikings) and thus can be trivialized through their use in sports. (Lindsay 2008, 212–13) Lindsay claims that Native Americans are thus mistreated by being implicitly relegated to this "trivial" class of persons when they are used as mascots. Here again, I do not think that this claim on its own is defensible when considering the sheer number of mascots that explicitly do represent actually existing persons, and do so in a plainly valorizing way: this is especially true in the case of the category of persons who are known by their location-such as the Islanders, the Mets, etc.-and ethnic groups other than Native Americans such as the Celtics, and the Canadiennes. Still, the content of the symbols, figures, and persons used as mascots does matter. One would have to engage in some fairly serious philosophical obtuseness not to notice that choices of mascots are not arbitrary, and that only certain sorts of things seem to work as mascots. In order to make sense of this, though, we will have to do two things: first, we will need to understand what it means for a mascot to "work"; second, we will need to examine the content and context required for this "working." In the next section, I will address the first of these two issues. The Signifying-and Unifying-Function of Mascots In The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1, Foucault concludes that, far from being a natural kind, "the notion of 'sex' made it possible to group together, in an artificial unity, anatomical elements, biological functions, conducts, sensations, and pleasures, and it enabled one to make use of this fictitious unity as a causal principle" (Foucault 154). Foucault's claim is that 103 ■ erin c. tarver the rise of certain medical and psychiatric practices produces a category of knowledge-sex-that comes to be understood as the unitary point of origin from which an incredible variety of disparate phenomena supposedly proceed. Now, although there is not a science of mascots, their function as signifiers, as I will argue, is quite like that of "sex." Or, perhaps better, a mascot is a primary means by which a "team" is unified and figured as a unitary point of origin. This is perhaps a counterintuitive claim, so let's analyze an example: the New York Yankees. First, it's important to note that, today, that which is signified by the term "New York Yankees" is more complex than it initially appears. We will, of course, want to say that it signifies a baseball team located in the Bronx, being composed of a particular set of individuals, perhaps including a manager and front office organization. But once we begin to enumerate the necessary constituent parts of the Yankees, we run into problems. Let us say, for example, that Alex Rodriguez is finally released from his contract-will the Yankees still exist? Yes, of course; even if A-Rod had been a necessary feature of an adequate extensional definition of the Yankees up to that moment, the act of his release would render the meaning of "the Yankees" unequivocally distinct from him. Yet, the meaning of "New York Yankees" is further complicated when we consider that its meaning is not merely limited to isolated instances of time. Rather-and just as importantly for fans-the "New York Yankees" is an entity that persists over time, despite innumerable personnel changes. Thus, fans and commentators are able to "follow the Yankees," to track the evolution of "their" performance, to expound upon the significance of "their" leading the all-time series against "their" rivals, the Boston Red Sox. And yet, there are significant respects in which there is not a team "there": rather, there are innumerable teams over the course of years. For, not only is there not the same team year to year; 'there' is often not even the same team from one month to the next (or even, arguably, one play to the next). Still, as Stephen Mumford puts it, the allegiance of sports fans depends on "the endurance of its intentional object," the team, despite the fact that it is quite difficult to specify, "what the endurance of its object consists in. Even a gap in existence seems to be no insurmountable obstacle to [a team's] identity" (Mumford 188). How, then, does the notion of a team-with lifetime records, championships won, lifelong fans, and so on-function? Mumford argues that teams are "social substances," by which he means that their identity is "to a degree conventional and conspiratorial" (191). 104 ■ critical philosophy of race In other words, teams exist over time to the extent that enough of the surrounding community of observers treats them as such. Thus, Mumford argues, "one of the components that are constitutive of the substance and its persistence through time is the intentional allegiances of which they are the object" (ibid.). Or, in other words, although the practices of sports fandom require an intentional object toward which fandom (or, to use Mumford's language, "allegiance") is directed, that intentional object is significantly constituted by sports fandom. However, Mumford claims that there must be "at least some metaphysical grounding" for the agreement by sports fans that there is a singular team 'there'-but grants that specifying this grounding is indeed quite dicey: there seem to be no necessary or sufficient conditions for identity of teams other than this agreement. Still, Mumford argues, something must persist in each case that will "persuade enough people that the conspiracy is sufficiently rational" (Mumford 2004, 192). Specifying the "something" whose persistence grounds the identity of the Yankees involves us in a Ship of Theseus–esque puzzle that will be insoluble as long as we assume that a team is like an artifact, or even like a "substance," however social that substance may be. If, however, we allow that a team may not, strictly speaking, be an object, but instead a name for a certain pattern of relationships, then the problem may be more manageable. In his book, The Construction of Social Reality, John Searle argues that many features of the social world are simply the product of "collective intentionality." These "social facts" are dependent upon individuals sharing "we intentions," which can range from "we are executing a pass play [in football]" to "we are having a cocktail party." In every case, the social fact created-whether it be playing football or having cocktails-is dependent for its existence, in part, on the collective agreement of the individuals involved (Searle 1995, 26). Now, one might draw on this argument to claim that the underlying metaphysical essence of the Yankees is the collective intentionality of the players-their "we intentions" to be a team together. But, while it is surely correct that such collective intentionality on the part of the players is a necessary condition for being a team, it is certainly false that their collective intentionality is enough to make them that team, the Yankees. You and I may collectively intend to play together as the Yankees, but while we may form a team, we lack the relevant agreement from our wider social milieu to make us part of the team that included, at various points, Babe 105 ■ erin c. tarver Ruth, Mickey Mantle, and Reggie Jackson. This is because that team is an example of what Searle calls an "institutional fact"-a collectively imposed function that is dependent upon collective agreement for the function to be possible (41). Institutional facts, like the value of money and scoring points in football, depend upon a collective agreement about "status-functions" of certain phenomena. Such facts, according to Searle, depend upon an agreement of the form "X counts as Y in [context] C" (46) for their existence, since, apart from such an agreement, there is nothing about the exchange of bits of paper or the carrying of a ball across a line that makes them significant-and, indeed, apart from this agreement there is no such thing as "money" or "points" at all. Thus, institutional facts or objects are fundamentally patterns of interaction, regulated by collective agreement about the status of a certain phenomenon: namely, that it (X) will have a particular function (Y) in some specified context (C). In the same way that collective social agreement governs when and where the utterance of certain words will result in my being married, it is collective social agreement that governs the continued existence of the Yankees, and their persistence over time. There is no way to be "married," just as there is no way for Ruth, Mantle, and Jackson to be members of the same "team," apart from the agreement that makes these functions possible. Whether this agreement is rational or not is perhaps as difficult a question in the case of money as it is in the case of sports fandom. In each case, we seem to be involved, as Searle puts it, in a kind of circular justification: the Yankees exist because people believe that they do. I take no position here on the rationality of the agreement, because it seems to me irrelevant. Even if we grant that the collective intentionality of fans or money-users is entirely self-referential, this will not change the status of Babe Ruth or a hundred-dollar bill, nor, importantly, the real consequences that would follow our attempts to will ourselves to be Yankees, or a person's thieving of such a bill. Still, it is perhaps more difficult to imagine why we might collectively agree to the existence of the historically persistent Yankees than to the value of money, since the functions made possible by this institutional fact are more saliently useful than those made possible by a professional baseball team. Answers to this "why" question need not, however, take the form of rational justifications. Sports fandom in general is decidedly a-rational. Allegiances to sports teams, like allegiances to friends and family members, are, even if rationally justifiable, primarily felt, or in Mumford's 106 ■ critical philosophy of race words, experienced as "emotional attachment." (Mumford 2004 184) For this reason, it is unclear why such emotional attachments would need to be metaphysically grounded in a way that is "rational"-they might just as well, I think, be grounded in vague feelings of connection or heritage, or even in the felt imperative to follow social convention. In fact, the motivation required for treating a team as a team may very well be precisely affective, and caught up with the desire of fans to identify with (or against) its fortunes. Mumford even admits that such fantasies of identification are a key feature of allegiance to a sports team when he writes: "part of the object of the allegiance is the supporters themselves: They support an entity of which they are a part" (193). However, Mumford suggests that this interesting feature of sporting allegiance is a consequence of his account of the identity of sports teams, rather than a constitutive feature of them. But, if we take seriously the extent to which fan behavior is constitutive of a team's identity (as Mumford suggests), we will have to acknowledge that such behavior need not be (and often is not) motivated by the rational appeal to a metaphysical grounding, but could instead be motivated by an affective attachment that need not be particularly rational. If this is true, then I think we must ask not "to what are fans becoming attached," but rather, "what are the mechanisms whereby fans become attached" to a team, such that there could be "a team" there? Returning to Searle's description of the mechanism involved in the collective imposition of status-functions is helpful here. Status-functions (which, again, take the form "X counts as Y in C") are not only dependent upon collective intentionality, but also upon language. In order for X to "count" as Y in some context, the members of the relevant group must agree to collectively represent it in the same way. As Searle puts it, "physically X and Y are exactly the same thing. The only difference is that we have imposed a status on the X element, and this new status needs markers, because, empirically speaking, there isn't anything else there." (Searle 69) These markers can be words or word-like symbols, Searle claims (75), but in every case, such "collective representation . . . requires some vehicle. Just scrutinizing or imagining the features of the X element will not do the job." (74–75) Considering our previous examples of Ruth, Mantle and Jackson (RMJ) illustrates why we need such markers. RMJ do not share any intrinsic features that obviously make them members of the same team; though they shared we-intentions with their own teammates from time to time, RMJ never shared such we-intentions as a group, since they never 107 ■ erin c. tarver played together. Yet, it is undeniable that RMJ "count" as members of the historically persistent team, the Yankees. That they function as such is only possible because of a linguistic practice that marks them with this status. A mascot is just such a status-marking linguistic practice. The primary function of a mascot, I think, is to facilitate the collective agreement and attachment of fans. In so doing, these markers draw together disparate persons, events, plays, losses, wins, riots, championships, ticket sales, and so on, into an artificial unity-a team-that is then, in Foucault's language, understood as that which underlies all of these things, or is their causal origin. The institution of a mascot (as name and symbol) is a discursive practice that makes possible the sense of the numerical identity of a team, and thus contributes to the constitution of it. Mascots, then, both represent and help to bring about that which is represented. Importantly, they need not do this through literal speech acts-symbols like colors or animals or Yankees pennants can work just as well. Moreover, the unifying signification of mascots is not carried out in isolation, but is more or less explicitly connected to the identification of a team with the community it represents. That is, the unification of disparate entities and phenomena into the historically persistent "Yankees" facilitates the identification of the Yankees with individual persons from New York. It is by subsuming the multiple and changing individuals who make up these teams into the symbol of the team that I, as a fan, am able to identify with their fates.4 Thus, the secondary function of the team-constituting institution of mascots is, I think, the identification and unification of a group of people (fans) who conceive themselves as related to one another at least in part because of their relations to that team. In other words, mascots work not only to constitute a team, but also to enable the self-identification of a fan base, which is a particular sense of collective or communal identity. Thus, when the symbol of the mascot draws together innumerable elements into a supposedly unitary "team," it does this, I think, for a larger purpose: facilitating the sense of a larger artificial unity: the community. In order to investigate the connections between the unification of a team to the unification and/or identification of a larger community, I want to examine one more example, this time one that is closer to home for me, as a native of south Louisiana: the LSU Tigers. In the case of the Tigers, we have the same major symbolic elements of the Yankees: individuals subsumed to a larger symbol in order to reiterate the existence of a continuous historical entity (here, LSU football). This subsumption was dramatically 108 ■ critical philosophy of race illustrated in the Tigers' ritual introductions on the Jumbotron preceding each 2012 home game in Baton Rouge's Tiger Stadium: as each starting player's name was announced (to the cheers of the 90,000 assembled Tiger faithful), a video image of him in LSU uniform, yellow helmet and all, appeared on the large screen. As though the uniform were not enough to enact his rebirth as one "Tiger" among many, the image of each player's face was, for a moment, digitally altered to appear with disturbingly realistic stripes, yellow eyes, and a catlike version of his own visage (LSU Starting Lineup Video 2012). The individuals in question were able to become meaningful as representatives of the fans in the stands, or as local heroes, precisely by being dramatically brought under the sign of the mascot. The local pride that is fostered by such symbolic unifications-bymascot should not to be underestimated. The everyday dealings of hometown or regional teams are reported on in excruciating detail in local papers; devoted fans discuss the fortunes of 'their' teams using the pronoun "we," not "they"; the cities and supporters of rival teams are mocked as unsavory in some way or another. (Zagacki and Grano 2005) Moreover, teams' fan bases are overwhelmingly localized: fans tend to form allegiances to teams local to their hometowns-which are stable in cases where individual persons move away, but which do not always survive the relocation of the team to another locale. In other words, as social scientists who study sports fandom have suggested, one of the primary functions of contemporary sports fandom is to foster a sense of community belonging, in an increasingly fragmented metropolis. (Hognestad 2012, Danielson 1997, 5) My claim, then, is that this communal "we" that is fostered, encouraged, and performed by the nearly ubiquitous fan chant, "we're number one," is itself facilitated by the institution of mascots-apart from which it would be much more difficult to find a "we" to identify with at all. But what is it about the mascot that makes this "we" workable? In other words, what is it about mascot symbols that enable them to function in this doubly identifying way? If successful mascots function to facilitate the unification of a team and its concomitant community, we should be able to articulate what is necessary in order for a particular signifier to be able to work as a mascot-but we should not necessarily expect that those conditions of efficacy require anything like rationality, strictly speaking. Because the meaning and effectiveness of a signifier is ultimately dependent upon its context, my investigation of the conditions of mascots' efficacy will proceed historically. 109 ■ erin c. tarver Mascots' Evolution and Efficacy In a 1907 article, a sports reporter for the New York Times wrote, "Local patriotism, as manifested in baseball, is a strange, irrational pastime. The crowd of local patriots have no hesitation in violently applauding this season as a native the same player whom last year they violently hissed as an alien enemy" (Danielson 9). This turn of phrase illustrates what a good mascot must do: it must be powerful enough to make friends of my enemies, and to make family of strangers. We must, somehow, come to feel that the honor of our community is at stake in the batting, tackling, and shooting fortunes of people who may have minimal knowledge of our geographical origins, our traditions, or even our language.5 What kinds of symbols can accomplish this? If we look at our contemporary classes of mascots all at once,6 I think that we will be at a loss to explain the panoply of figures there represented-and this may be why there are such wideranging, and sometimes unsatisfactory explanations (as discussed in section one) for the origins and problems of Native American mascots. Instead, I think it will be more productive to again take a hint from Foucault, and consider that, when dealing with discursive practices, one should not expect univocal explanations, or historically neutral or static phenomena. So, in a Foucaultian spirit, I want to do a brief historical analysis of the advent and development of professional baseball and football7 mascots in the United States, paying attention to the moments of discontinuity and division, rather than continuity and unification. When we view the history of professional baseball and football teams and their mascots8 historically, it is striking how very little continuity there is between the earliest forms of mascots or team names, and the most recent. It is, in some ways, difficult to imagine how the images of red stockings (1869), on the one hand, and diamondbacks (1998), on the other, could be equally (or even similarly) effective as unifying signifiers-or, it is at least difficult to imagine this at their advent. One could easily imagine a signifier like a red stocking becoming culturally meaningful given time and agreement in usage; a pragmatic account of meaning should expect no less. The story is more complicated, however, when one considers a context in which these signifiers are new. The earliest such signifiers-such as the Athletics, Redcaps, and Brownstockings of nineteenth-century baseball-are purely descriptors of the team, in either its location (the Philadelphia Athletic Club), or apparel. 110 ■ critical philosophy of race This trend was largely repeated in professional football, with the addition of names that simply reflected the occupation of its athletes, and/or the sponsoring business entity. Significantly, though, these teams were not simply members of a glorified beer league; they were professional teams, generating enough fan loyalty to support a business-and ultimately, a big business, that was organized into the revenue-generating machines of Major League Baseball and the National Football League. And yet, such teams did generate such fan loyalty and identification by, apparently, asking fans to identify with the color of a sock. But this isn't quite true, of course: the name, and the uniform, in these early cases, is almost incidental-and it is so precisely because the work of unification it must perform is already supported (or, perhaps, accomplished) by other means. Who is that team? Well, they're the team from the Philadelphia Athletic Club, from Cincinnati, from the Panhandle Railroad, or from the Jefferson Park neighborhood. In these early cases, the naming looks much more like a description. It is, largely, merely significant of what is already "there": a group of people united by living together in a particular locale. Indeed, in these early days of professional baseball and football, many players-even professional ones- were literally from the cities and neighborhoods for which their teams were named. In such cases, the team's being that team is not dependent upon the standard institutional fact rule, "X counts as Y in C." Even though the team is a social fact characterized by collective intentionality, it is precisely the sort of case that Searle describes thusly: "the 'rule' does not add anything but a label, so it is not a constitutive rule" (44). Names of this sort are simply labels for pre-existing characteristics, meaning that being identified with that team is simply a matter of sharing those characteristics (notably, local origins). Given this reality, it is not difficult to imagine fans developing an attachment to or identification with a team. This sort of identification is of a piece with other familiar forms of local pride. What seems quite different, however, is the "irrational" local patriotism documented by the 1907 Times reporter-the sense of a community whose boundaries and kin are being constantly remade by changes in contract and sock color. This change in sports fandom, it seems to me, tracks changes in the development of the cultural practices of sport-and marks the emergence of true mascots as we know them today. As baseball and football become increasingly professionalized, and their athletes commodified, the teams involved become increasingly heterogeneous, 111 ■ erin c. tarver and decreasingly identified with their locales through birth or background. This is displayed prominently in table 2, where increasing professionalization and commodification of baseball and football are marked by the advent of organized professional leagues, restrictions on players eligible to be treated as professional, the institution of drafts, and the advent of the highly-publicized signings of "star" athletes. In concert with these developments, players are traded or accept lucrative contracts far away from their childhood homes. Competition between proliferating leagues (not to mention teams) drives this diaspora of athletes and desire for a hometown team that will still, somehow, inspire civic pride. Along with increasing professionalization and commodification, then, we see the emergence of names-of mascots-that conjure increasingly powerful, even fantastical, images. Who are we? We are the Broncos! We are the Yankees! We are . . . the Indians. table 2 baseball mascots chronologically with developments in racial segregation and professionalization* 1860 Philadelphia Athletics 1869 Cincinnati Redstockings 1870 Chicago Whitestockings National League founded; segregation instituted (1870) 1871 Boston Redstockings 1876 Boston Redcaps 1882 New York Gothams 1883 Boston Beaneaters 1883 St. Louis Brownstockings 1885 New York Giants 1885 St. Louis Browns 1887 New York Metropolitans 1887 Pittsburgh Allegheneys 1888 Brooklyn Bridegrooms 1890 Chicago Colts 1890 Cincinnati Reds 1890 Philadelphia Phillies 1891 Brooklyn Grooms 1891 Pittsburgh Pirates 112 ■ critical philosophy of race 1894 Detroit Tigers 1894 Grand Rapids Rustlers 1894 Sioux City Cornhuskers 1895 Detroit Wolverines 1895 St. Paul Apostles 1898 Chicago Orphans 1899 Brooklyn Superbas 1899 St. Louis Perfectos 1900 Cleveland Lake Shores American League Founded (1900) 1900 St. Louis Cardinals 1901 Baltimore Orioles 1901 Boston Americans 1901 Chicago White Sox 1901 Cleveland Blues 1901 Washington Senators 1902 Chicago Cubs 1902 Cleveland Broncos 1903 Cleveland Naps 1903 Los Angeles Angels 1903 New York Highlanders 1907 Boston Doves 1908 Boston Red Sox 1911 Boston Rustlers 1911 Brooklyn Trolley Dodgers 1912 Boston Braves 1913 New York Yankees 1915 Cleveland Indians Minor League Draft instituted (1921) 1932 Brooklyn Dodgers 1936 Boston Bees 1936 San Diego Padres Reintegration begins (1947) 1961 Minnesota Twins 113 ■ erin c. tarver Amateur Draft Instituted (1965) 1965 Houston Astros 1969 Kansas City Royals 1969 Montreal Expos 1969 Seattle Pilots 1970 Milwaukee Brewers 1972 Texas Rangers 1977 Seattle Mariners 1977 Toronto Blue Jays 1993 Colorado Rockies 1993 Florida Marlins 1998 Arizona Diamondbacks 1998 Tampa Bay Devil Rays 2005 Washington Nationals 2008 Tampa Bay Rays *Includes mascots of NL and AL teams (current and defunct), plus professional teams later admitted to MLB. In cases where a "new" team takes the same name or mascot as a previously existing team in the same location, I have used the earlier date. Even these more fantastical images, of course, are of various types. At times, as in the case of the Yankees, these images are simply idealized images of the community itself. The community cloaks its athletes in a vision of itself or of its proudest moments, and they become Texans, or Patriots, or Yankees, no matter their personal origins. And, importantly, the projection of this idealized image allows these teams to represent the community itself in this idealized way. But, other symbols are of an apparently different sort. The Tigers, the Spartans, the Falcons, the Tornadoes, the Jets, the Vikings, the Astros, the Rockies-these images are, I think, fantastical images of power, force, and legendary or even superhuman capability. These images are the stuff of Hollywood films, larger-than-life embodiments of daring, danger or might itself, even though they refer, literally, to entities or objects whose actual existence is (or was) far more mundane. The vagaries of actual existence, truthfully, are not the point in the case of these mascots. It does not matter whether individual Norse men were fearsome in battle, or even if they wore the famous horned helmets-just as it does not matter whether actual Tigers or Falcons pose a physical threat to humans, as we destroy their 114 ■ critical philosophy of race habitats, nor whether the machinery of a jet engine (short-lived as it is) is a worthy model for the bodies of our athletes. What matters, instead, is the collective fantasy of power or aggression that they inspire-the sense that we, too, become fearsome or daring when identified with them. This class of cases involves the invocation of ideals associated not with a specific feature of the community itself, but with the force of winning in competition- and this is the class to which Native American mascots belong. As Laurel Davis points out, "Native Americans are stereotyped as wild, aggressive, violent, brave, stoic, and as having a fighting spirit, traits commonly valued in athletics" (Davis 1993, 12).9 In a third class of cases of long-standing team names (such as the Reds, the White Sox, or the Red Sox), the unifying signifier becomes a mascot, insofar as it conjures images of the heroes of yore, or the 'tradition' of the community that was their home. In each of these three cases, though, it is important to note that the literal content signified by the mascot is important only to the extent that it conjures an image of the community as ideal, powerful, historically significant, or some combination of the three. Some images simply will not do-feminine figures, for example, are apparently unworkable, as are any other images tainted in the cultural imagination as weak; also unworkable, in many cases, is a mascot from a team's previous location, particularly if it is too evocative of that region or its people. The important thing, in each case, is that the content of the mascot image matters, not because its adopters have substantial interest in the literal thing or person signified by them, nor because it is makes a rational appeal to some metaphysically grounded continuity, but to the extent that the adoption of this mascot can produce a forceful enough image to serve as an instrument of unification whose meaning is not limited to its literal referent. One might suggest, at this point, that the fantastical images of communal identity that I have described here are not, in fact, nearly so important as the marketing strategies employed by the owners of these professional teams, whose financial goals are achieved precisely by inciting the sort of brand loyalty evinced by dedicated sports fans. There is a vast literature on marketing and the commodification of identity, which has established the significant role of advertising and the fetishization of capitalist consumption in the reproduction of contemporary subjectivities (Hebdige 1979, McCreanor et al. 2005, Crogan et al. 2006). On such accounts, the commodification of sports works precisely to make a "'consumer' feel like a 'fan' . . . through consumer goods." (Crawford 2004, 81) It is, in other words, 115 ■ erin c. tarver "through consumer goods that the 'fan' can increase their knowledge, and more importantly, display their commitment . . . and [thus] feel increasingly integrated within their chosen supporter community. For crucially, this is what the contemporary sport venue sells" (ibid.). Thus, one might argue, once we have reached the level of cultural practice operative in professional sports team mascots in the United States what might appear to be the identification of a community-say, in "Red Sox Nation"-is only a very successful branding campaign. The "metaphysical grounding" in such a case would thus be nothing more than the skill of professional marketers, who dupe individuals into believing that their own identities are at stake in the support of a particular team-which is to say, a particular business. There is clearly a significant marketing element in the production and consumption of mascots (and thus, of sports teams), and nothing in my argument is meant to reject the notion that the identity of contemporary teams and their concomitant fan bases are inextricably bound with their places in the capitalist economy. On the contrary, I have suggested that the advent of increasingly fantastical mascot images is largely necessitated by the community fluctuations occasioned by the increasing commodification of professional sports and athletes. However, accepting this claim does not entail that we necessarily accept that mascots are reducible to ad campaigns. Indeed, it seems to me that a sufficiently robust account of the effects and functions of mascots must not accept such a reduction. Reducing mascots simply to effective branding fails to explain the difference between fan loyalty and simple brand loyalty-why, that is, even the most loyal purchasers of Coca-Cola or Budweiser do not tend to think of themselves as members of a community, nor act as though the product they consume as integral to their identities in some way. Moreover, simply writing off mascots as marketing tools and sports fans as dupes does not address the specific content of that marketing, or the fantasies that make it compelling. In other words, even if it is true that mascots are examples of effective marketing (and again, I do not deny that they are), leaving the analysis here fails to explain the specific character of fan involvement-an involvement which is, again, in large measure constitutive of the entity (or "team") being marketed. Although it is crucial to recognize the role of consumption in the practice of sports fandom, then, a robust account of mascots requires both attention to the content of the mascot-images that facilitate communal identification, and a recognition of the active role of sports fans in adopting mascots-and thereby, communities. I have attempted to do precisely this 116 ■ critical philosophy of race by offering a historical analysis of the advent and content of mascot images that takes the fandom activity of community constitution and community identification seriously. The Instrumentalization of Native Americans as Mascots I have argued that mascots are unifying signifiers that facilitate the constitution of historically persistent teams, and in so doing, to enable the identification of a community with its team. Historical analysis reveals that the content of the mascot image must be sufficiently powerful (in at least one of three ways) to make this latter unification possible. We are now, finally, in a position to return to the question of Native American mascots. Keeping in mind the function of mascots, and the means by which this function is accomplished, I want to conclude by articulating why the mascotting of Native Americans is so deeply troubling. Following the implications of my argument, the use of Native Americans as mascots is the usage of Native American persons as instrumental facilitators of a fantasy of communal identity. This usage is facilitated through a fantastical caricature of "the Indian" that 'works' as an image of the second type I described in the last section-an image of power and violence. Rather than functioning as an idealized image of the actual community it represents, "The Indian" as a mascot reduces innumerable peoples, families, and cultures to a fearsome symbol that may be adopted purely to foster a sense of the (white) community it represents as powerful and daring-as the star of its own Hollywood film. The realities of the lives of actual indigenous people are immaterial to this usage; this fact is made disturbingly vivid by the performance of rituals like the "Tomahawk Chop" by a sea of mostly white, foam "tomahawk"-wielding fans to the tune of a caricatured Native drum beat. These images are certainly, as Churchill, Fryberg and others have pointed out, stereotypical and degrading, and their effectiveness as mascot images seems dependent upon the reiteration of these stereotypical images (it is difficult to imagine portrayals of, say, contemporary life on the reservation as effective mascots). We could, in fact, stop here, and note that the proliferation of these derogatory images, despite the protestations of Native American groups, involves a clear disregard for a group of persons based on their race-and thus, constitutes a racist practice. As I suggested in the beginning, however, I think that 117 ■ erin c. tarver there is a particular ill associated with using these images as mascots, and to understand why, we must recognize what the usage of such images in this context implies. More than treating Native American persons as inconsequential or as reducible to a simple stereotype, their mascotting requires the tacit exclusion of actual indigenous people, for their inclusion could disturb their effectiveness as a symbol that facilitates the unification of a (white) community to which they, decidedly, do not belong. In other words, although Native American mascots are, in significant respects, 'like' mascots of Vikings or Astros (insofar as they are figured as images of human power), their insidiousness lies in their peculiar combination of instrumentalization and exclusion. The usage of "the Indians" or "the Redskins" as a unifying signifier requires both the reduction of actually existing persons to an image capable as serving as the medium of a fantasy of communal identity, and the elimination of these actual persons from the community so constituted, lest they disturb the fantasy-or, more pressingly, pose a threat to the community instrumentalizing them. Ironically, that is, the figure of "the Indian" as a powerful image requires envisioning actual indigenous persons as literally powerful, violent, threatening or intimidating to those treating them as mascots. This is the image of Native Americans as savage threat to white civilization, which must be eliminated-unless their power can be contained and harnessed for 'our' own purposes. The use of Indian mascots, in short, involves the tacit reiteration of a sentiment that has more or less explicitly characterized white supremacy: these people exist for us. The extent to which Indigenous peoples are purely instrumentalized by Native American mascots is made more salient when we consider the racialized limits of the teams and communities they served to constitute, and the surrounding cultural context that makes their caricatured images effective. The Boston Braves, the first professional team in the United States to make use of a Native American mascot, did so in 1912-fortytwo years after the "gentleman's agreement" that institutionalized racial segregation for the National League, and only twenty-two years after the massacre at Wounded Knee. The few Native American athletes who were allowed into the league during this period faced significant racist taunting, including "war whoops . . . [and] ki yis" from fans, "silly poetry . . . and] hideous looking cartoons" from the local sports media, and the nearly ubiquitous nickname of "Chief" from their teammates (Vascellaro 2011). Their status as racially marked outsiders was made consistently clear, even 118 ■ critical philosophy of race as fantastical images of that marking were being used as symbols for the team and community that denied them full membership. Similarly, the NFL's oldest Native American mascot still in use today-the Washington Redskins-was adopted in 1933, the year that racial segregation was instituted in professional football.10 Prior uses of Native American mascots in professional football included teams named after existing baseball franchises (the Cleveland Indians and the Boston Braves), and, in one notable case, a "publicity stunt" team comprised entirely of Native players who toured the country for the explicit purpose of drumming up sales for the owner's dog kennel business. (Pro Football Hall of Fame 2013) Even the leader of this "all-Indian" team, Jim Thorpe, who went on to be named the greatest athlete of the twentieth century in 1950 after success in a handful of other professional football teams and the 1912 Olympics, was treated more as symbol than man. Thorpe's 1953 New York Times obituary, for example, opens, "Jim Thorpe, the Indian whose exploits . . . won him acclaim as one of the greatest athletes of all time, died today in his trailer home" ("Jim Thorpe Is Dead on West Coast at 64"). In both football and baseball, athletes of Native descent, even when they were stars, were not so much integrated as tokenized, caricatured, and themselves treated as mascots. Native American mascots reached their peak of new usage, then, during a period of de jure white supremacy, and in tandem with a host of other practices that enforced the secondary status of actual Native Americans. table 3 football mascots chronologically with developments in racial segregation and professionalization** 1901 Columbus Panhandles 1901 St. Louis Cardinals 1902 Toledo/ Kenosha Maroons 1905 Detroit Heralds 1906 Canton Bulldogs 1910 Rochester Jeffersons 1915 Staten Island Stapletons 1916 Akron Burkhardts 1916 Muncie Flyers 1916 Providence Steam Roller 1918 Akron Pros 119 ■ erin c. tarver 1919 Green Bay Packers 1919 Racine Legion APFA [later NFL] formed (1920) 1920 Buffalo All-Americans 1920 Chicago/Decatur Staleys 1920 Cleveland Tigers 1920 Dayton Triangles 1920 Hammond Pros 1920 Rock Island Independents 1921 Chicago Bears 1921 Cincinnati Celts 1921 Cleveland Indians 1921 Detroit Tigers 1921 Evansville Crimson Giants 1921 Louisville Brecks 1921 Minneapolis Marines 1921 Tonawanda Lumbermen 1921 Washington Senators Ban on use of college players (1922) 1922 Milwaukee Badgers 1922 Oorang Indians★ 1923 Duluth Kelleys 1923 St. Louis All-Stars 1924 Buffalo Bisons 1924 Cleveland Bulldogs 1924 Columbus Tigers 1924 Frankford Yellow Jackets 1924 Kansas City Blues Red Grange Signed (1925) 1925 Detroit Panthers 1925 Kansas City Cowboys 1925 New York Giants 1925 Pottsville Maroons 120 ■ critical philosophy of race 1926 Akron Indians 1926 Brooklyn Lions 1926 Buffalo Rangers 1926 Duluth Eskimos 1926 Hartford Blues 1926 Los Angeles Buccaneers 1926 Louisville Colonels 1926 Racine Tornados 1927 New York Yankees 1928 Detroit Wolverines 1929 Boston Bulldogs 1929 Minneapolis Redjackets 1929 Newark/Orange Tornadoes 1930 Brooklyn Dodgers 1930 Portsmouth Spartans 1932 Boston Braves Segregation instituted (1933) 1933 Boston Redskins 1933 Philadelphia Eagles 1933 Pittsburgh Pirates 1934 Detroit Lions 1934 St. Louis Gunners First NFL Draft (1936) 1936 Boston Shamrocks 1936 Cleveland Rams 1936 Pittsburgh Americans 1936 Rochester Tigers 1937 Cincinnati Bengals 1937 Los Angeles Bulldogs 1940 Pittsburgh Steelers 1944 Boston Yanks 1944 Brooklyn Tigers Reintegration begins (1946) 121 ■ erin c. tarver 1946 Buffalo Bills 1946 Chicago Rockets 1946 Cleveland Browns 1946 Los Angeles Dons 1946 Miami Seahawks 1946 San Francisco 49ers 1949 Chicago Hornets 1952 Dallas Texans 1953 Baltimore Colts 1960 Boston Patriots 1960 Houston Oilers 1960 Titans of New York Washington Redskins Integrate (1962) 1963 Kansas City Chiefs 1963 New York Jets 1965 Atlanta Falcons 1965 Miami Dolphins 1967 New Orleans Saints 1976 Seattle Seahawks 1976 Tampa Bay Buccaneers 1995 Carolina Panthers 1995 Jacksonville Jaguars 1996 Baltimore Ravens 1999 Tennessee Titans 2002 Houston Texans **Includes NFL teams (current and defunct), plus teams from AFL II, AFL IV, AAFC and APFA (each of which featured teams later incorporated into modern NFL). In cases where a "new" team takes the same name or mascot as a previously existing team in the same location, I have used the earlier date. ★Only team with Native American mascot to feature Native American players. Continuing this trend contemporarily are the NFL's Washington Redskins-ironically, the last team in the league to racially integrate, in 1962 (Smith 2012)-whose team owner Dan Snyder continues to insist that "Redskins" honors Native Americans, while refusing to meet with actual Native Americans who dispute that characterization. (Cox and Maske 2015) Opponents of the activists who speak out against the Redskins mascot, 122 ■ critical philosophy of race more often than not, express-more or less explicitly-views like those of one particularly open author of a letter to the editor of the Washington Post, whose argument is based on the claim that the name "never held any such weight or meaning for me. . . . As for whether the Redskins name marginalizes Native Americans, that battle was lost to the U.S. government and non-natives' greed more than a century ago" ("Letter to the Editor," emphasis mine) The message here is quite clear: Native Americans are not part of this conversation-because white views and feelings are the important ones, this matter having long been settled. Beyond the Redskins, whose mascot is the frequently singled out among other Native American mascots for its usage of a slur, teams and communities all over the United States continue to instrumentalize fantastical images of Natives while, as Taylor puts it, "continuing to treat Indian tribes as wards of the state." (Taylor 2013, 145) With mascotting's combination of instrumentalization and exclusion in mind, it is perhaps telling that one of the most frequently cited arguments made in favor of the continued usage of Native American mascots is the importance of upholding a non-Native team's, or a community's, traditions (Callais 2010, 72–73; Silva 2007, 253; Davis 2002, 14). Opponents of Native American mascots should take these declarations seriously, because, however irrelevant they may appear to the ethical question of the usage of such mascots or to the general argument about the harmfulness of demeaning imagery, they contain a tacit admission of the role of such mascots for the teams and fans that support them. Specifically, they contain the tacit admission that mascots are crucial for the perception of continuity and persistence of a particular community, and that this continuity and persistence is (felt to be) of greater importance than any harm that might be experienced by those who are instrumentalized to serve as mascots. In short, such admissions as the one in the epigram of this paper make salient the extent to which Native American mascots are more revealing of the white communities that use them than the Native ones they purport to "honor."11 The treatment of Native Americans as mascots is racist, then, not only because it involves (or indeed, requires) the proliferation of stereotypical and degrading images of Native Americans. The mascotting of Native Americans, in addition, instantiates the particular ill of instrumentalizing the persons caricatured by mascot images, treating them as worthwhile only insofar as they are effective as unifying symbols for someone else's community. Treating Native Americans as mascots 123 ■ erin c. tarver is thus racist in (at least) two ways at once: it disregards Native persons by withholding respect and concern for them by portraying them with demeaning stereotypes, and it further withholds respect and concern by treating them not as full members of the community, but as a means to that community's ends. I have argued that Native American mascots are racist in a way that goes beyond their being an instance of negative and harmful stereotyping.12 To understand why, we must first make sense of what mascots in general are, and how they function. Mascots, I have argued, contribute to the constitution of historically persistent teams, and by extension, in the identity of the communities that those teams represent. The usage of Native Americans as mascots is the reduction of persons to this constitutive role, which requires their concomitant instrumentalization and exclusion from the community that so instrumentalizes them. Native American mascots are thus not merely racist; they are racist in a way that exceeds the racism of the mere stereotypical imagery that they use. notes 1. Although the data on college sports is also fascinating, it is much more unwieldy, as colleges more frequently change mascots than do professional teams. The relative stability of professional sports teams in the United States will be important for comparative purposes later in the paper, as I undertake an analysis of the development of professional sports mascots from the mid-late nineteenth century through the present. 2. See table 1. 3. See King and Springwood, Beyond the Cheers: Race as Spectacle in College Sport (SUNY 2001), 55–56. Although this is an otherwise brilliant book, to which I am significantly indebted, this claim is simply false. 4. There are a wide variety of sports fans and sports fan experiences, from casual fans whose interest in a team is limited to a few important games, to devotees whose emotional (and perhaps financial) allegiance to a team is a thoroughgoing element of their everyday lives. (Giuliannoti 2002, Crawford 2004, Wann et al. 2001) I will not address the varieties of fandom in detail here, beyond making clear that my interest in what follows is in the allegianceand identification-practices of sports fans who are actively invested in the fate of a team, rather than merely passive spectators, for whom the outcome of a game is inconsequential. Given that there are fans with such allegiances and identifications-such that fans are able to feel themselves to be 'part' of the team for whom they cheer, as Mumford puts it-it is crucial to account for the possibility of and motivation for that identification. 124 ■ critical philosophy of race 5. Indeed, as Grano and Zagacki (2005) suggest, the rhetoric of sports fans suggest that winning and losing of 'their' teams is precisely a matter of the community's honor, and/or sense of itself. 6. See table 1. 7. I focus here on professional baseball and football because these sports have the longest history of professional league competition in the U.S., and thus offer a larger range of data. I am restricting this historical analysis to professional teams in order to provide a legitimate basis for comparison with the contemporary team mascots represented in table 1. 8. For the following paragraphs, see tables 2 and 3, which illustrates a chronology of team names/mascots, with dates of significant developments in professionalization and racial segregation/reintegration marked. 9. For additional arguments that Native American mascots require the stereotyping of Native Americans, see Black 2002, Springwood 2000, and Spindel 2000. 10. See table 3. 11. For more on the idea that Native American mascots reveal more about whiteness than "redness," see King and Springwood 2005, and Taylor 2013. 12. I have not, of course, addressed all of the rich literature on this stereotyping or its effects, on either Native or non-Native persons. I have, instead, been focusing on the particular effects that are unique to the usage of such stereotyping images specifically as mascots. works cited American Psychological Association. 2005. "Resolution Recommending the Immediate Retirement of Indian Mascots, Symbols, Images and Personalities by Schools, Colleges, Universities, Athletic Teams, and Organizations." Black, Jason E. 2002. "The 'Mascotting' of Native America: Construction, Commodity, and Assimilation," American Indian Quarterly 26, no. 4, 605–22. Callais, Todd M. 2010. "Controversial Mascots: Authority and Racial Hegemony in the Maintenance of Deviant Symbols," Sociological Focus 43, no. 1. 61–81. Churchill, Ward. 2002. 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