There is nothing offensive about a baseball team being named the Indians, and by erasing it we lose more than just a name.
In the latest episode of corporate wokeness fixing a problem that doesn’t actually exist, the Major League Baseball team the Cleveland Indians is changing its name after having used the moniker for 105 years. This follows the decision by the Washington Redskins of the National Football League to change their name this season. Whatever you think of that decision by what is now the Washington Football Team, it is plainly obvious that these two cases are nothing alike. Not to put too fine a point on it, but the term “Indian” to indicate a Native American is not even remotely racist. Just to cite just one example, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian is named what it is named precisely because American Indian is the term preferred by many Native Americans. Should the museum also change its allegedly offensive name? Of course not. The closest thing to a sensible argument about why we should not use the term “Indian” to describe Native Americans is that it is rooted in a mistake made by Christopher Columbus, who as we all know by now was a horrible racist whose name should never be uttered. But so what? That was 500 years ago. And in the time since, the American Indian, though in many cases badly mistreated by the United States government, also became a central part of American history and legend. That is what we really risk losing in this damnation of history.
