White Privilege On Display In Skowhegan Mascot Controversy Is Ugly

White privilege on display in the Skowhegan mascot controversy has not been particularly appealing.

Firstly, there is the business owned and operated by an actual member of the school board that oversees Skowhegan Area High School and its team names. Maine Fire Equipment owner Todd Smith advertises many products with the name and cartoonish depictions of "Indian" human beings on them.

Screenshot from Maine Fire Equipment website provided by Ann McMichael

I shared some of the racist imagery from their website in an open letter I wrote to both Smiths (wife Karen is on the board also) pointing out that they might have a financial interest in voting on issues related to the team name/mascot. I later found out that both of them had in fact voted against holding a public forum on the mascot issue which took place on January 8.

The only feedback I got from the board or this local business is that Todd's employee Jessica Pinkham asked politely that I take down the screenshot with her elementary school age daughter wearing an Indians scarf. And I did that on my online post of the letter. (A redacted version of my screenshot can be seen above.)

So, it's okay for a white parent to use her child's photo to sell merchandise that is harmful to other people's children, but it's not okay to use the child's photo in an argument about why board members who profit from selling racist merchandise are unqualified to vote on the issue. Got it.

The Skowhegan "Indian Pride" group has made it abundantly clear that they feel is also okay to disregard and even insult Native parents who argue that the stereotyping represented by continued use of mascot is harmful to their children.

Several of them called the Penobscot Nation tribal office this week to demanding to speak to "someone with a brain" i.e. not the tribal ambassador Maulian Dana. SIP leader Jennifer Poirier, also a board member, emailed Penboscot chief Kirk Francis to say that the tribe would be subject to a lawsuit unless he reined in Maulian on the mascot retirement campaign.

Then came the comment thread on this article by Doug Harlow about a bill introduced in the new legislature sponsored by Rep. Ben Collings, An Act to Ban Native American Mascots in Maine Schools (LR 2188). I was quoted in the article saying that a lot more education about Maine Native history and culture is needed in Skowhegan. This is a screenshot from part of the thread:

Disclaimer: I do not now nor have I ever had "something to do" with the prestigious summer residency art program founded by, among others, the late social realist artist Ben Shahn.

Another disclaimer: I am unaware of any effort to change the team name to Savage's [sic], as was alleged by this Facebook post with an unidentified photo of gratuitous violence (presumably committed by Natives because of the arrows?).

The reason that violent language and imagery is dangerous is that hearing hate speech primes your brain for hateful actions. 

A study by cognitive psychologists at at Arizona State University goes a long way toward explaining a persistent aspect of hate crimes: they are virtually always preceded by hate speech. Rehearsing an act of violence activates the very same neural pathways in the brain as actually committing the same act of violence. Thus, all genocides are preceded by a long campaign of violent language against the targeted group.

Fragile white people will no doubt attack me again for using the r-word to describe their actual cultural appropriation of the images and ceremonial objects of people that survived attempted genocide.

More education is also needed about white privilege -- why it exists, and how it works.

For those interested in learning more than they know, here's a good place to start. "White fragility: why it's so hard to talk to white people about racism" by Dr. Robin DiAngelo can be read and pondered at The Good Men Project website.