When the National Science Foundation sent me the 2011 report on earned PhDs. I immediately headed for the graph that breaks down the numbers by race/ethnicity.
Like all credentials, the PhD can represent more aspiration than reality, but the aspiration is worthy by any measure. The objective of a doctoral dissertation is to add to the total store of human knowledge in a measurable way.
It’s true that some PhD granting schools are more rigorous than others, the same as undergraduate schools.
My claim is not that the credential is infallible evidence of the accomplishment it is supposed to represent. We all know better than that. But it’s also more than just the union card for the professoring trade, and the more tribal citizens with advanced degrees—PhD, MD, JD, or others—the more 21st century possibilities are open to the tribe, not just the individuals who get the degrees. So, yes, if my academic career has involved advancing Indians on the micro level, one student at a time, I remain highly interested in the macro level.
I remember a discussion about the minimum number of Indian lawyers it would take to form a section of the American Bar Association and realizing it would require us to literally sign up every known Indian with a law degree (at the time) to what is a voluntary and quite expensive organization (to which I currently do not belong).
I remember talking with a non-Indian MD who was working off his school debts with the Indian Health Service and coming to the realization that he did not think much of Indians.
I don’t like the view at the bottom of the barrel.
In the 2011 numbers, I noted that Hispanics, at 2,006 new PhDs, surpassed African-Americans, at 1,953. This has been a continuing trend because Hispanics (16.7% of the population) outnumber blacks (13.1%). American Indians, even by the expansive new definition that doubled the numbers, and even adding Native Hawaiians, are only 1.4% of the population. Number of new PhDs? 136.
Let’s review.
African-Americans are about 13.1% of the population and produced about 6.14% of the new PhDs.
Hispanics are about 16.7% of the population and produced 6.31%.
Indigenous persons are, on paper, 1.4% of the population, a number that is greatly overstated by self-reporting from the Elizabeth Warrens of the world. We produced .43% of the new PhDs.
I watched similar numbers for years involving the JD degree. We are growing in absolute numbers, and we’ll continue to get better because education is as hereditary as lack of education. I am a first generation college student and all four of my kids went to college.
So, are we satisfied?
I’m not satisfied, and contemplating these numbers over time makes me want to revert to savage stereotype.
Speaking of savage stereotypes, some people would say that the problem of our lack of success in education is a problem way bigger than, say, Indian mascots.
With that painful sight of Robert Griffin III going down on his knee the wrong way, I was reminded that I care about him as an exciting rookie player from my neck of the woods while I root for the Washington team to lose, always.
RGIII played his high school ball at Copperas Cove and his college ball at Baylor. He’s one of those new wave running quarterbacks. You never know if he is going to hand it to the running back, throw it, or take off. More to the point, neither does the defense.
So why, oh why, did he have to get drafted by the Washington team?
In 2008, a refereed article appeared in the Journal Basic and Applied Psychology, “Of Warrior Chiefs and Indian Princesses: The Psychological Consequences of American Indian Mascots.” Like most science, it contains more mathematics than opinions, but I’ll skip the math and go to the money shot in the abstract:
“We suggest that American Indian mascots are harmful because they remind American Indians of the limited ways others see them and, in this way, constrain how they can see themselves.”
It’s time that non-Indians understand when they tolerate Indian mascots, they cut our children’s throats with imaginary tomahawks.
The public Indian comes in two versions, primitive relic or romantic warrior, both doomed. Historical figures, feared in the past, pitied in the present, irrelevant to the future.
When I was a professor at the University of Texas-San Antonio, they still had an affirmative action plan. It did not call for the recruitment of Indians, citing the lack of Indian PhDs in the talent pool. There was a hiring goal for Asian males, but none for Indians of any gender.
There were two Indians on the faculty. They other guy did not get tenured. I did, but I took an offer at a Research I school….where I was one of two Indians. Again, I was the only one of the two of us to get tenured, but they hired three more and we discovered another who had never before made himself known. Two of the three hires left by the time I did.
If Indian students did not get mentored by non-Indians, they would never get mentored. Not that the lack of mentors is the major problem. The major problem is that most research universities contain more dead Indians as “scientific data” than live Indians as students.
I was born in a small town in Oklahoma where the most numerous minority was Indians. Only one in my age cohort finished high school. I myself made it only to the ninth grade. We expected no more of ourselves than the public schools expected of us, and we had no educated role models.
That has not changed, and we’ve had about all the “honoring” by turning us into mascots that we can stand.
I wish RGIII all the best for a quick recovery, and for the day he plays for a team that does not disadvantage Indian children.
How is mascotting Indians wrong?
It’s not a crime and cannot be made a crime consistent with the First Amendment, but not everything that does harm is a proper subject for criminal law.
What about a tort? The closest cause of action that comes to mind is “intentional infliction of emotional distress,” but I know of no case applying that theory to a group rather than an individual. Then there are theories rooted in the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Titles II and VI.
This is the classic discourse of wrong, lapsing into the question of remedies with alacrity if not with coherence. We find a delict and we follow it with a remedy involving punishment in the case of a crime or as a tort, such as "intentional infliction of emotional distress." Most tort law is created by courts rather than legislatures, serving to allocate responsibility for harms that arise from human activity, and protect the victims with injunctive relief or compensate the victims with money damages.
Finally, the law is exhausted, leaving us wondering how to respond to deviant conduct that violates our shared intuition of justice yet cannot be reached by law or, worse, harmful conduct that is not deviant at all.
Enter zemiology, the study of harm reduction, from the Greek zemia, not yet a recognized discipline except among some of us who might be characterized as criminology malcontents.
Zemiology views all of human interaction as balancings of harms. Recreational drugs, unregulated, cause one set of harms. Criminalized, another set of harms. Decriminalized, another third set of harms and legalized a fourth set that may not be identical to the unregulated status quo ante. It is not meaningful to the policy choices to simply say you do or don’t like recreational drugs.
The critique offered by a social harm perspective in terms of the limits of current academic disciplines is not confined to criminology. However, a shift from a focus upon crime and law to social harm, and from analyses and explanations located in pathological individuals or malfunctioning institutions to more structurally based modes of inquiry, analysis and prescription, do impinge particularly significantly upon criminology. One key advantage that a social harm approach might have over criminology is that it might have greater potential for “joined up” analysis and prescription. That is, understanding and treating harm requires reference to a range of disciplines and spheres of social, public and economic policy.
The analysis offered here will go far beyond “there ought to be a law” regarding the mascotting of Indians or any other peoples similarly placed in our social power structure. It will not deny that there are at least two sides to the question but will offer a way of looking at the various sides that should appeal to people of good will.
Indian mascots cause harms. That statement should not be controversial, although the nature of the harms and their seriousness certainly is. While not having Indian mascots does no harm in the abstract, we must recognize that doing away with Indian mascots is a change in the status quo and therefore involves harm to persons for whom changes in the status quo cause anxiety.
One very significant and relatively recent change has been a policy by the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) to prohibit member colleges and universities “…from displaying hostile and abusive racial/ethnic/national origin mascots, nicknames or imagery at any of the 88 NCAA championships.” Since the policy applies only to championship games, it is in some sense more a moral statement than a robust threat. However, hope of a championship springs eternal in NCAA competition, so the policy produced a veritable chorus of stuck pigs squealing.
Clearly, the NCAA policy did harm. How do we know? Because the people who felt harmed told us so, the same way we always know harm unaccompanied by physical injury or destroyed property.
What justifies the harm the NCAA is prepared to inflict? The “hostile and abusive” charge is, after all, a conclusory statement that while unsupported means no more than, say, “enemy combatant.” Nobody will defend hostility or abuse and in the years of mascot wars the NCAA policy seeks to end, the claim that hostility and abuse are good has played no part.
Then-NCAA President Myles Brand stated that “(t)he NCAA objects to institutions using racial/ethnic/national origin references…” With all due respect to Dr. Brand, this cannot be the case when references to the Irish (Notre Dame Fighting Irish, Iona and St. Mary’s-California Gaels), Greeks (Michigan State, among many others, Spartans; University of Southern California, among many others, Trojans), Scots (New Jersey Institute of Technology and Radford Highlanders; Edinboro and Monmouth Fighting Scots), Bethany Swedes, and Louisiana-Layfayette Ragin’ Cajuns go unchallenged.
If it is the mascot rather than the “reference,” I would point to “Izzy the Islander,” the mascot for Texas A & M University at Corpus Christi, a representation of Pacific Islanders that makes “Chief” Illiniwek seem positively tame. The Brigham Young-Hawaii Seasiders use a stylized Pacific Islander on their logo, but nothing cartoonish like Izzy. I am not informed whether the Cooper State Cannibals field a mascot.
If “references” were the issue, it would seem that religious references would be problematic—Padres, Deacons, Friars—and the various representations of the other side would cause trouble for Devils, Sun Devils, Red Devils, Blue Devils, and the college that tries to have it both ways, the Wake Forest Deacon Demons. Speaking of references, a couple of teams lionize classes of historical persons who were hardly admirable in their initial appearances, the Kansas Jayhawks and Oklahoma Sooners. And it’s hard to imagine the depths of offensiveness that could be plumbed at a halftime show by the Mississippi Rebels, the George Washington Colonials, or the Holy Cross Crusaders. No, there is something going on deeper than mere “references.”
Before leaving the area of mere reference to an ethnic group, however, I would be remiss to ignore the Northern Colorado Fightin’ Whites. As an intramural team, the Whites are not subject to NCAA policies, but it is worth noticing that their logo is a 1950’s paean to Ward Cleaver with the motto “Every thang’s gonna be all white!” The Whites have adorned their shirts and caps with symbols of that time when everything was all white, and have sold enough paraphernalia to endow a scholarship for American Indian students at Northern Colorado without any expressions of pain from white people. Undergraduates in my classes often argued that this was evidence that white people are more broadminded than Indians or, conversely, that Indians are hyper-sensitive to insult.
A “reference” is not an insult, although the NCAA Executive Committee does endorse “…the best practices of institutions that do not support the use of Native American mascots or imagery.” Only at the very end of the NCAA press statement was there finally some reference to utilitarian principles, “the negative impact of hostile or abusive symbols,” but even then the reader is left without a clue of what that negative impact might be, how we can separate a “hostile and abusive” reference from any other reference.
It did not take mascot fans long to notice an intrinsic problem in the characterization of mascots as “hostile and abusive.” Philosopher Mike McKenzie argued that “…the NCAA goofed. Just as it is self-evident that no religious devotee denigrates his or her own gods, no fan thinks ill of his mascot or what it represents. It is unthinkable that people would denigrate their own totems.” McKenzie, who teaches philosophy at Keuka College, is absolutely correct provided that he, like the NCAA, shuns consequentialist ethics. He also places the burden of proof to show that a mascot is “hostile and abusive” on those who advocate change. He claims this is “clearly” the case, but does not say why. He appears to indulge a presumption that what is, is right, which is an odd posture for a philosopher but one a zemiologist should indulge in recognition of the anxiety that always accompanies change.
In the matter of showing harm, I assume we can postulate that education is a good and therefore a lack of education is a harm to an individual or to a class of individuals. I make this assumption as a member of the least successful ethnic group in American education, and a ninth grade dropout from Oklahoma public schools. American Indians and Alaska Native children are touch and go with African-American children for lowest test scores in reading and mathematics. As Jon Reyhner points out, Indian children drop out at higher rates than any other ethnicity, and this causes a dropping of the lowest test scores, which tends to raise the average. This dubious distinction of having the highest dropout rate continues at the college level.
The last time I spoke about Indian mascots to a class at Indiana University, a student asked “Are you claiming that mascots affect the self-esteem of elementary school children?” I replied that there is some evidence for that claim, but I can say that I’m a gray-haired man with three college degrees and the public discourse about Indians affects my self-esteem.
I remember the blogs crackling with commentary on the University of Colorado’s firing of Ward Churchill, many repeating Dennis Miller’s bon mot that Churchill is a “tenured Tonto.”
Churchill is not an American Indian, but he has always claimed Indian identity. Would Miller stand on television, where he repeated his “tenured Tonto” remark, and disagree with an African-American by calling her a “degreed darky?” Not likely, not any more likely than that our Nation’s capital city, which is predominantly African-American, will soon call their National Football League team the “Blackskins” or even the “Negroes.”
This objection is at its root political, but well within the bounds of political legitimacy if America believes its democratic pretensions. American democracy is linked to personal freedom. How much personal freedom obtains where any faction with fifty percent of the vote plus one is entitled to disrespect any opinion held by the rest of the country? America claims to stand for diversity rather than enforced standardization.
It is well within American political tradition for minority groups to demand, in Ronald Dworkin’s words, “…equal concern and respect in the design and administration of the political institutions that govern them.”
While it is certainly possible to trivialize sports enough to argue that therefore the governance of collegiate sports does not matter, such arguments are unlikely to have much traction among persons who care about college mascots. At least since the Civil War, American democracy has assumed equal regard among all persons similarly situated as a legal principle, equal protection of the law. As a philosophical principle, equality dates from the Declaration of Independence but is, to put it kindly, still growing into the terms of its promise.
Both the equal regard and self-esteem arguments are of course undercut when a tribal people consents through their duly elected representatives to their own mascotting.
Whether Osceola turns over in his grave every time the Florida State Seminoles mascot his memory is a question best left for those in touch with Osceola’s spirit, and living Seminoles are certainly more likely to maintain that contact than white people or even other Indians. However, Osceola the “real” mascot and Illiniwek the faux mascot do not charge onto a level playing field of discourse but rather a battleground over indigenous identity: who can claim it and what entitlements (if any) are attached to the claim?
Many trees have died on that battleground, and white people are not disinterested in the outcome, since they have been playing Indian for generations.
Let us not dwell here on the history, quibble over body counts, or dispute title to real estate. Guns, germs and steel have done their work, and after viewing exact replicas of early settler ships I am forced to admit that bravery also played a role.
However it happened, “white” is now the social equivalent of what computer scientists call the “default setting,” the standard against which all social practices are measured. This standard of whiteness creates an invisible dominance that is no less dominant for its invisibility. Invisibility is, indeed, a potent source of power, an organizing principle of social discipline according to Michel Foucault. Making fun of white people as white people cannot threaten their dominance and everybody involved knows that. It is in-group humor and all of society is the group.
Black comedians can hurl the N word and Indian comedians can make rez jokes that would be abusive coming from a white comic because they are sharing in-group humor. But the group is much smaller and therefore less powerful.
As to white people, it is all in-group. In this day and age, nobody is going to portray the “Fighting Irish” as fighting because they are drunk, although there was a time when that could happen and it would be taken as abusive. Now, offices from the Presidency on down have been held by Irish.
As Tim Wise put it so well, “Objectification works against the disempowered because they are disempowered.” White people, of course, do not as a group understand non-whites to be disempowered any longer.
They would not call even an all-black team the “New Jersey Negroes” because they perceive, correctly, that the mainstream civil rights movement (which is still black-dominated) would be outraged enough to cause a great deal of bad publicity. Many further perceive, in light of the legal attempts to level the playing field for minorities and women dating from the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and subsequent amendments, that social power is a zero-sum game and much of the power traditionally held by white males has been lost.
A credible claim of historical victimhood now represents power that white people cannot have. This is a post-modern crisis of white male identity and every college teacher with any empathy for students has noticed it. Too many whites feel themselves surrounded in college by less competent minorities because of racial preferences and look forward to losing in the job market to those same less qualified minorities.
In economic terms, white identity has been devalued. There is no doubt that whiteness does have value and achieving white identity has been the subject of a great deal of litigation that would be hilarious if not for the real impact on the lives of real people. As to Indian identity, George Castile has observed that the (American) “..colonialists made a ‘market’ for ethnic identities, in which they have been traded as a commodity ever since. Over time the price of these commodities has fluctuated…”
Ironically, Indian mascots as revered by white people rescue the devaluation of white identity by diluting the Indian-as-victim narrative in a matter Bakhtin would call “carnivalesque,” inverting the social relation in a ritualized way.
White crisis or no, the Indians who survived the colonial onslaught do not have control of their identities in the public imaginary, which remains fixated on the white man’s Indian.
Who is the white man’s Indian?
Well, it’s relatively easy to imagine the psychological impact on the survivors of genocide. Say, if a small Jewish population were living within the borders of a victorious Third Reich, there would be an unhealthy amalgam of survivor guilt and self-loathing, punctuated perhaps by an occasional outbreak of vengeful violence.
That, of course, is not the question.
I ask, rather, what about the impact of genocide on the perpetrators? Is guilt inherited and therefore reparation owed? There are two ways to avoid issues of guilt and reparations, both of which are evident in the discourse of the white man’s Indian: the extinct Indian who deserves to be extinct as a condign result of inferiority in the social Darwinist sense and the idealized Indian who is so noble that he functions as a living apology for the Indian dead.
There is little room in this dominant imaginary for the Indian college student who sweats exams, gets his or her heart broken while negotiating early intimate relationships, struggles with finances and homesickness—in other words, the normal college student.
The analysis informed by zemiology, social harm-balancing, suggests that tribal endorsement exceptions to the NCAA policy undervalue the interests of Indian children. If being portrayed as mascots in fact further disadvantages the least successful ethnic group in American education, it is almost as difficult to justify the NCAA offer of exemption as it is to justify a tribal government cooperating in the process.
In addition, the NCAA policy completely disregards the most socially destructive aspect of allowing non-white mascots in a polity that aspires to be a melting pot. Just as animal mascots assume the superiority of human animals over non-human animals---a position contrary to most tribal traditions---the essentially false representation of non-white peoples by white people serves to teach white supremacy.
This matter of comparing animal mascots to human mascots is more relevant to the zemiology of mascotting than has been so far noticed in the literature. The claim against Indian activists has been that they demand more respect for their worldview than is due, and that demand is nothing more than “political correctness” run amok.
If Indians were in fact demanding respect for their world view, we might be arguing about disrespect to bears, hawks, and eagles, although the University of Arkansas-Monticello Boll Weevils, the University of California-Santa Cruz Banana Slugs, the Richland Thunderducks, and the Scottsdale Community College Fighting Artichokes would probably escape criticism.
The mythology of the dominant culture places all of creation in a “great chain of being” based on nearness to or distance from God. Arthur Lovejoy’s history of the Great Chain is rife with references to the “Hottentot,” and the assignment of essentialized humans to separate links on the chain supported European race theory and fit the vertical nature of the Great Chain in a manner that justified slavery and imperialism.
The Genesis story underpins the Great Chain of Being, according to Lovejoy, “…the plan and structure of the world which, through the Middle Ages and down to the late eighteenth century, many philosophers, most men of science, and, indeed, most educated men, were to accept without question…”
The Genesis myth, and the hierarchy that has followed in religion and science, is not the only way to envision humans and non-human animals and their relationship. Cherokees believe, for example, that much disease among humans is revenge taken by animals for having been treated poorly. A hunter who kills without need or without asking pardon of his prey takes his life in his hands. Animals are actors in Native stories, not just acted upon, and humans lack any innate superiority.
American Indian creation stories lack the ontological punch of Genesis, since they are more about coming to be here rather than about coming to be. Humans in these stories are typically surrounded by other “peoples” who often play pivotal roles in how we came to be as we are and where we are. The poet Alexander Pope, speaking for Christianity, finds this dependence on mere animals rather than an omnipotent God cause for pity:
Lo, the poor Indian! Whose untutored mind
Sees God in clouds, or hears Him in the wind;
His soul, proud science never taught to stray
Far as the solar walk, or milky way;
Yet simple Nature to his hope has given,
Behind the cloud-topped hill, an humbler heaven;
Some safer world in depth of woods embraced,
Some happier island in the watery waste,
Where slaves once more their native land behold,
No fiends torment, no Christians thirst for gold.
To be, contents his natural desire,
He asks no angel’s wing, no seraph’s fire;
But thinks, admitted to that equal sky,
His faithful dog shall bear him company.
For the “poor Indian,” existence is not a vertical chain representing hierarchy but a circle representing interdependence or a “sacred hoop.” Vine Deloria, Jr. asserted that “(i)n all of North American Indian traditions, there is …. no sense of ‘animal bondage’ but rather relationships with the specific peoples of creation; hence, creation is ultimately good and humans are a part of it.” To be a part of it is not to be the reason for it or the master of it. Gregory Cajete explained:
Councils of animals that must give their blessing to human undertakings are alluded to in many ways in Indigenous mythologies. Humans rightfully and respectfully ask the permission of animals for doing things with them and to them. This is the meaning of the dances, rituals, and ceremonies Western scientists sometimes call “animism.”
This apparent digression into American Indian beliefs regarding animals has two purposes.
First, to show that we are not in fact demanding that the dominant society respect our beliefs in the mascot controversy. Our beliefs would limit the circumstances and the manner in which some animals could be mascotted, and some of these beliefs are held sacred by certain tribes and absolutely respected by that tiniest of tribes, American Indian university professors.
The second purpose is to demonstrate that the mascotting of Indians is, like the mascotting of animals, an expression of hierarchy.
What Aunt Jemima and the Frito Bandido and “Chief” Illiniwek all have in common is that they are all created by and owned by the dominant culture. They are “people” of color manipulated for the public amusement and profit of white people. The only voice allowed these “people” is that of their creators, and the primary message is unavoidably that the relationship between the creations and the creators is natural and right.
Allowing American Indian tribes to endorse specific mascots is bad to the extent that the endorsement spills over into the social arrangement of white supremacy, but that evil might be somewhat mitigated if the endorsement signified tribal control over the commercial use of its name or images.
A pure economic analysis would send us to the yellow pages of any telephone book to count the trade and service marks based on American Indian tribes and individual Indians. Realistically, nobody expects to see General Motors paying royalties to the descendants of Pontiac or Chrysler questioning which of the three federally recognized Cherokee tribes are owed for the use of their name for all these years. Maybe tribes could someday hope for the power to veto the most egregious abuses, such as Crazy Horse Malt Liquor, if they could get some degree of voice in the general marketplace by using the NCAA as a toehold.
Mascotting is of course a process of commodification, and therefore economics must play some part in any discussion of harm. I tend to dismiss out of hand, however, the contention that vendors of paraphernalia featuring Indian mascots stand to suffer financial hardship.
First, these things do not happen overnight and the paraphernalia can all be replaced with the new mascot.
Second, a look at the sale prices for vintage pickaninny dolls and lawn jockeys leads one to wonder what a roll of Illiniwek toilet paper will bring in ten years? It will certainly be too valuable as a collectable to be put to its customary use.
Tribal endorsement of an Indian mascot may help reclaim ownership of tribal identity understood as if it were a trademark. An economic analysis would support the reclamation project, if there were any realistic prospect that mascotting would signal the end of cultural imperialism rather than just another manifestation of it.
A zemiological analysis suggests that once a non-white representation is cast into a universe of discourse that assumes whiteness, control of the semiotic impact of the mascot image is lost. The lack of control is manifested in the content of the message, since even the rare tribal consultation is not control, and also in the commonplace gestures of athletic opponents (“Scalp the Indians!”) and the sight of white crowds tomahawk chopping or otherwise playing to stereotype.
If we really believe that our lack of success in academia is tied to the attacks on the self-esteem of Indian children represented in mascotting, we will not endorse mascots even for tribal colleges. Even if we dismiss the links between low self-esteem and academic failure, what about our youth suicide rates? Do children who feel good about themselves take their own lives?
I have tried to keep a sense of humor about mascotting, as befits someone from football country who grew up rooting for Purple Pirates and has been a distance fan of another high school team, the Fighting Sand Crabs. But there is little humor in the dearth of American Indian colleagues around me and American Indian students in my classes.
There is even less humor in youth suicide.
There is credible evidence linking Indian mascotting to both problems and I must ask who should have the burden of proof when the stakes are so high? If the NCAA statement is based upon consequentialist ethics it should not even ask tribes whether they approve. It will always be possible to find some Indians, or alleged Indians, who approve of mascotting or don’t care one way or the other. Should the NCAA please sports fans to the detriment of Indian children provided the sports fans are also Indian?
It is certainly true that being mascotted is not the only cause of low self-esteem in American Indian children. It is, however, one of the more easily manageable causes. Tribal governments are struggling with socio-economic disadvantages that, as mascot defenders often point out, dwarf the mascot problem and probably will take generations to resolve.
I suppose it is possible that all our problems, and particularly our lack of academic success, may finally be attributed to our intellectual inferiority. I do not find that likely. However likely it is, do we want to build public policy around it? If we do that, all the zemiological analysis of competing harms becomes moot. We will then have arrived at the only way for a white-dominated society to honestly endorse a non-white mascot: an unambiguous embrace of white supremacy.
This is the meaning of people in the capitol of this nation built on Indian bones singing:
Hail to the Redskins
Hail Vic-tor-y
Braves on the Warpath
Fight for old D.C.