Stately or demeaning? Appreciation or appropriation? “Controversial” or racist?

After only 45 years of protests and lawsuits, the Cleveland Indians will remove the logo of the red-faced, big-toothed, feather-in-cap Chief Wahoo from their baseball uniforms and caps. But it won’t be before they finish the 2018 season, even though the team deems it “inappropriate.” And, never fear, it will still sell merchandise with that caricaturized logo.

Talk about a foul ball.

If you’re one of those who doesn’t understand why using Indigenous mascots and logos and team names is racist, at the very least pause for thought knowing the people it portrays find it so. Use this occasion for a moment of humility, perhaps, an acknowledgment that you don’t necessarily have insights or even a right to decide what is appropriate to marginalized peoples, what they find racist, and when they’re asking, across generations, across tribal nations, to please stop, to do so.

It’s possible that you simply don’t get why making money off logos depicting cultures on whose backs your nation was built, whose peoples were killed off, whose land was stolen by the predecessors of the current profiteers is offensive.

It’s possible that you don’t see why people whose languages, whose way of life, whose customs and conventions were demeaned as backward and savage, might find logos that caricaturize their traditional and historically significant chiefs are a continuation of colonial ridicule.

It’s possible that you wonder, how will not using a logo end racism? That would be like saying how does supporting one child end world hunger, but never mind. In your head, you are the real victim here. It’s your sentimental little heart that’s attached to an image or a name, but in your mind, they are the snowflakes. It’s your eyes that now have the onerous task of getting used to seeing a new image. Your inconvenience trumps their request for equal treatment.

How dare they infringe on your right to freedom of logo choice?

It’s possible that you do a quick Google search and say, hey, this began as an act of honouring “Indians” for their superior athletic skills. Think, though: can you honour people if you don’t include them in your sports team and are actively indifferent to their lives in every other way? Their kids may be denied equal funding for education or health or taken out of their homes with ease. They may have been reduced to living on reserves without fresh drinking water or electricity. But no, it’s the logo on your damned sports team that matters.

Those teams. It’s not just logos but team names across sports leagues that use native inspired names and imagery without explicit permission that need to go, and soon. Over in England, a team of hockey players called Whitley Warriors. And wouldn’t you know it? Their women’s team is called the Whitley Bay Squaws.

On our continent, it’s a well-worn list. Cleveland Indians — the logo may be going, the name needs to change, too. Chicago Blackhawks. Atlanta Braves. Edmonton Eskimos. And of course, the name that is rooted in a violent racial slur: Washington Redskins.

Redskins, clearly, doesn’t just refer to the colour of the skin. It refers to the “red skin” bounty hunters would collect from the scalps of natives they slaughtered.

As the campaign points out, using it in other instances has real consequences. A child calling another child by that name would be pulled in for bullying, an adult for harassment and if it was scrawled on someone’s home, the perpetrator would be charged with a hate crime.

Never mind, though. That team’s owner Daniel Snyder has said his team will NEVER change the name, and he is backed up by NFL commissioner Roger Goodell.

The wrangling over the racist Chief Wahoo logo — which first appeared in 1947 — spilled into a Toronto court in October 2016, when Indigenous Canadian activist Douglas Cardinal sought a court injunction to prevent the Cleveland team, MLB and Rogers — which broadcast the games — from using the logo in Ontario. He had argued that the team name and the logo are racist and discriminatory and that using them ran contrary to the Ontario Human Rights Code.

That petition was denied.

Monday’s news must offer partial relief, though the battle continues.

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“As people who have been here thousands of years,” Cardinal told USA Today last year, “I think we have the right to be treated fairly by the immigrant culture that have come on these lands. So when I see something that is offensive to my Anishinaabe heritage, I feel that I have to, for the sake of my children, speak out.”

Shree Paradkar writes about discrimination and identity. You can follow her @shreeparadkar