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VANCOUVER — For more than 50 years, Simon Fraser University’s sports teams have played under the name The Clan, to honour the Scottish heritage of the school’s namesake.

But now, amid violent neo-Nazi marches in the United States, some professors and students are sounding the alarm that the name evokes a very different clan — the Ku Klux Klan.

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Philosophy professor Holly Andersen has launched a petition to persuade the university to change the name, saying the word “clan” sounds the same spelled with a “C” or a “K” and is associated with a horrible history in the U.S.

She said SFU is the only Canadian school to play in the National Collegiate Athletic Association, a league dominated by American teams, and it’s disrespectful to competitors, especially African-Americans, to force them to play against a team named The Clan.

“It is not that the term clan is itself racist. The issue is the context: in Canada that term is neutral, but in the U.S. it is as bad as a pretty bad swear word. Quite literally, it is a term that silences normal conversation,” she said in an email.