Blog #3: Bamboozled and logos in sports

On Tuesday we watched Bamboozled, a movie by Spike Lee that focuses around a black television producer, Pierre Delacroix (Damon Wayons) who comes up with an idea for a show called Mantan: The New Millennium Minstrel Show, where the African American actors dress up in black face and satirize racism. Delacroix hopes that Mantan will get him fired from his job because he's sick of his racist boss. On the contrary, Mantan turns out to be a huge success amongst the American people.

Ram Samudrala from KillerMovies.com wrote a review saying, "The message the movie appears to be telling us (in the way Delacroix intended to do) is that almost all Black entertainment today is made to satisfy the White majority. The movie also directly implies that the mostly-White executives who control the Entertainment channels support Black entertainment mostly in a condescending manner, one that isn't that much different from Slave-era treatment of Blacks. These are all powerful statements to make and Spike Lee argues for their truth (quite convincingly) through this role-reversal story where economics, class, and race intermingle in a complex manner. I recommend checking Bamboozled out if you have the patience for dialogue."

            Bamboozled is a great movie, it really makes the viewers think about racism in their everyday lives. At some point in everyone’s life they see some kind of racism, they might not be the subject of racist comments but at the very least they’ve seen racist sports mascots, which is what we talked about on Thursday.

Blackhawks logo

            Professor Evans gave a lecture about racist sports mascots on Thursday. I never really realized it, but there are quite a few teams that have offensive mascots or logos. The mascots that he talked about, such as the Seminoles, Indians, Braves and Redskins never struck me as offensive until he pointed out the racist aspects of each logo. One team that he didn’t mention is the Chicago Blackhawks. The Blackhawks logo is the profile view of a Native American warrior with “traditional war paint” and tribal feathers. The Native American has dark skin and a large nose. These are all stereotypes that many Native Americans must resent.

            Since 1997 Miami of Ohio’s school mascot is the Redhawks. Their logo features a fierce looking red hawk. However, prior to 1997 their school mascot was the Redskins. Their logo was a stereotypical Native American with feathers in his hair. This change is a sign that people are becoming more conscious about racial stereotypes and are not willing to accept racism in sports. Hopefully the Washington Redskins will soon change their name and racist logo.