The Florida State Seminoles: The Champions of Racist Mascots

The Nation ^ | January 7, 2014 | David Zirin

[C19fan]

It’s easy to oppose the name of the Washington Redskins and call for owner Dan Snyder to change his beloved bigoted brand. After all, it’s a dictionary-defined slur bestowed on the NFL franchise by their arch-segregationist, minstrel-loving founder. When you have Native American organizations, leading sportswriters, Republicans as well as Democrats in Congress and even the president say the time has come to change the name, it is not exactly difficult to get on board.

But what about the Florida State Seminoles, whose football team on Monday night won the Vizio/Dow Chemical/Blackwater/Vivid Video BCS National Championship Game? The NCAA, since 2005, has had formal restrictions against naming teams after Native American tribes, and yet there were the Seminole faithful: thousands of overwhelmingly Caucasian fans with feathers in their hair, doing the Tomahawk chop and whooping war chants on national television. Their passions were stirred into a frenzy by a white person, face smeared with war paint, dressed as the legendary chief Osceola riding out on a horse. As Stewart Mandel of Sports Illustrated gushed, “Chief Osceola plants the flaming spear in the Rose Bowl. Awesome.” (Osceola was adopted after the school quietly retired their previous Native American mascot “Sammy Seminole.”)

[Georgia Girl 2]

Yeh, Sammy has been doing backflips across the field before every game since I was there and I won’t say how long ago that was. I was doing the chop and chant and nobody had a problem with it. We never thought we were insulting the Indian nation.

[poobear]

There’s a couple more things this Gator fan would have him “blank”!

[packrat35]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seminole_Wars

[Prov1322]

Here's an interesting note from the wiki entry...

The 1868 Florida Constitution, developed by the Republican-dominated Reconstruction legislature, gave the Seminole one seat in the house and one seat in the senate of the state legislature. The Seminole never filled the positions. In 1885, after southern white Democrats had regained political power in the state, they passed a new constitution in 1885. It removed the seats for Seminole and established barriers to voter registration and electoral practices that essentially disfranchised most blacks and minorities.[95] This situation lasted until the passage of federal civil rights and voting legislation in the mid-1960s, which provided for the enforcement of citizens' constitutional rights.