Indians miss mark on Chief Wahoo logo

The Cleveland Indians are missing the point with Chief Wahoo’s latest demotion.

On Friday, Cleveland Indians owner Paul Dolan spoke about the team’s famous Chief Wahoo logo, declaring that it has been officially demoted to a sleeve patch and nothing more, according to ESPN. For those unfamiliar, Chief Wahoo is the cartoonish Indian with a bright red face that the Indians have used in one form or another as a logo since 1947.

Yet, the logo has to be the most insensitive thing we have in all of professional or colligiate sports. While the National Football League’s Washington Redskins are often ripped apart for their apparently offensive nickname, the logo comes nowhere close to being as vulgar as Cleveland’s red-faced Native American.

Dolan went on to say that the Chief Wahoo logo will be sticking around, while in the same breath acknowledging that certain people are offended by it.

"“We do have empathy for those who take issue with it. We have minimized the use of it and we’ll continue to do what we think is appropriate.”"

In 2016, everybody seems to be offended by something. It is a neverending stream of folks whining whether there is cause or not. In this case, the Indians should absolutely abort the logo that is not only offensive, but incredibly so.

Getting back to that quote, when is using Chief Wahoo appropriate? It is literally an Indian with a red face and huge teeth. How this has not gotten more attention is amazing. Can you imagine the Redskins have that logo on their shoulders this September? FedEx Field would be burned to the ground.

So why not the outrage? It’s baseball.

First, the sport is no longer as popular as football. Second, baseball has a long-standing tradition of being racially and culturally insensitive, while also being incredibly slow to change. Everyone knows about the color barrier which lasted until Jackie Robinson broke it in 1947, but the Latino players also struggled to gain prominence, consistently being shouted at on the field by their white contemporaries well into the 1960s.

Baseball also did not have a black man as a manager until 1975, when Frank Robinson took over as a player-coach for the … Indians. Then there was the whole Al Campanis saga, when the Dodgers front office man went on Nightline back on April 6, 1987 and stated that blacks were not smart enough to be in positions of power. Campanis was fired, but the statement stood as a monument to how many in baseball’s upper crust felt.

Now, in 2016, we have a red-faced Indian on the sleeve of a Major League Baseball jersey. The owner knows that it is racist and ugly enough to put into the background, yet leaves it there. It almost feels like a taunt, knowing it should be eradicated completely.

Yet, in the final analysis, Dolan is simply too naive or too gutless to completely wash the uniform clean of Chief Wahoo.