Commissioner Suggests Cleveland "Transition Away" From Wahoo Logo

MLB commissioner Rob Manfred has been having "productive discussions" with Cleveland owner Paul Dolan about having the team "transition away from the Chief Wahoo logo".

As the news report states, Manfred has previously said only that he understands why many people find the logo offensive. (The commissioner is merely an employee of the owners, but couldn't Manfred simply order the team to stop using the logo?)

Bob DiBiasio, Cleveland's senior vice president for public affairs hopes that "a solution that is good for the game and our organization" can be found.

Corbin Smith, Vice Sports:

Chief Wahoo: so racist. Just, like, unbelievably racist. Saying why this is so almost seems wrong, just because... I mean, you can see it, right? Even engaging in the argument feels like giving credence to the other side, and the other side is just out-of-control absurd. ...

MLB should probably bring unilateral action against Chief Wahoo, but commissioners and the adjacent sports-league apparatus work for the owners, and so instead of taking direct action against the hateful cartoon they're more sort of, uh, suggesting, that the team that plays in Cleveland might uh refrain from sticking that super crazy racist cartoon on their hats, if that was a thing that team wanted to do.

Two articles from last October:

Jon Tayler, Sports Illustrated:

In 1947, Cleveland Indians owner Bill Veeck decided that his team needed a new logo. ... So he went to the J.F. Novak Company, a local business that had created patches for the Cleveland Police and Fire Departments, and asked them to create an Indian-themed logo that "would convey a spirit of pure joy and unbridled enthusiasm."

The task fell to 17-year-old draftsman Walter Goldbach. "I had a hard time figuring out how to make an Indian look like a cartoon," Goldbach told Cleveland Magazine six decades later. "I wanted him to be happy." ... Goldbach came up with a smiling, yellow-skinned face with big eyes, a large hook nose and a single feather sprouting from a band at the back of his head. The design was accepted ...

The logo was altered slightly in 1951, with the skin changed from yellow to red and the nose made smaller. It has survived, in some form or another, over the last 65 years of Indians baseball ...

In 2014, the Indians again made a change, announcing that going forward, the team would use a red block C as its new primary logo. The move came after a few years of quietly deemphasizing Chief Wahoo on uniforms and at Cleveland's stadium, Progressive Field. In 2009, when the Indians moved their spring training home from Winter Haven, Fla., to Goodyear, Ariz., Wahoo was not featured in their new facility—one that, notably, is located in a state with a far larger American Indian population than Florida. That same year, Wahoo disappeared from road batting helmets, replaced by the aforementioned block C. ...

The use of Chief Wahoo—essentially a red-faced Sambo figure, no different than the horrific blackface visages that were commonplace in the 19th century—normalizes racist attitudes toward American Indians. It dehumanizes a group of people who have, since the first days of colonization and Western exploration, been brutalized and marginalized with unimaginable cruelty. ... It trivializes the history of an entire people.

Lindsey Adler, Deadspin:

The Cleveland Indians are on their biggest national stage since their last visit to the ALCS in 2007, and the franchise is celebrating by rubbing its racism in the faces of every person tuning in to watch baseball at the peak of its season. ...

This is even more ridiculous than it appears at first, because in April of this year—the beginning of the baseball season—Indians owner Paul Dolan said the team would move away from using the demeaning depiction of a supposed Native American, instead making the block-letter "C" the team's primary logo. ...

Here we are in October, though, and despite claims that Chief Wahoo is no longer at the forefront of the team's image, it's very easy to look at the team's uniforms and see he is. The Indians aren't changing shit, and they should just say as much.

The Indians can't deny that the depiction of Chief Wahoo fosters disrespect of Native Americans—in fact, their claim that they would deemphasize the logo tacitly acknowledged as much. ...

This is a function of a vastly larger problem, which is that racism against Native Americans is just not viewed with the same seriousness as other kinds of racism in America. ... We as a country have been taught highly revisionist histories, but the uncomfortable truth is that the founding and expansion of the country were the outcome of acts of genocide, erased largely by disenfranchising and dehumanizing the victims. Wahoo, whether or not devoted Indians fans want to admit it, is a symbol of that process, and so are the uses to which he's put.