Oklahoma State Senator introduces anti- mascot bill

A Tulsa lawmaker says she was so moved by pleas to remove Indian mascots from Oklahoma schools that she felt compelled to introduce legislation that would do just that.

“It was the easiest thing to do,” Oklahoma State Senator Judy Eason McIntyre told the Native American Times. I followed the issue involving the [Union Redskins controversy] and I realized it is offensive to some people. As an African American I know how hurtful some words can be.”

Union High School, despite repeated requests from both Indian and non-Indian activists, staunchly refused to change the name of their mascot, claming that the cost was prohibitive and that the name was not offensive to them. Union is situated in one of the wealthiest areas of Tulsa and their new Multipurpose Activity Center is estimated to cost $22 million. There are no American Indians on the school board.

The Tulsa Indian Coalition Against Racism said they strongly support McIntyre’s legislation.

“TICAR has been active in attempting to create change at Union High School…. [We] attended every school board meeting for two years to voice their opposition to the mascot name they say refers to Indian scalps. Union voted in 2003 to retain the mascot. Despite repeated requests from TICAR, the school has never met with [us],” TICAR said in a statement. “Of the 3,000 schools, which at one time used Indian mascots in American schools, 30 years ago, over 2,000 have dropped the use of Indians as stereotypical mascots. Not one public school in Oklahoma has dropped their mascot. Of the 900 schools in the nation which still use Native Americans as team mascots, 165 of them are in Oklahoma.”

McIntyre, a Democrat from District 11, said that the legislation, SB 567, originally included all Indian-themed names such as “Warriors,” but would be amended to just ban “Redskins” and “Savages.” Even with that modification, Eason knows that passage is anything but assured.

“Like anything else, there are some who will support it and some who won’t. I know there are some Native Americans who have don’t have a problem with these words and some that do. I will appeal to the goodness of my colleagues. If the name was the Union Rednecks, people would want that changed,” she said.

In order to pass, the bill must first go through a committee hearing. McIntyre said she expects that will happen within the next three weeks.

My alma mater, El Reno High School, has been the "Indians" forever (and yes, that's an accurate drawing of the standard mascot logo - there is no live mascot). To my knowledge, this has never stirred up much of any controversy here, even though the district has a large Indian Education Program (don't blame me that they don't call it "Native Education"), and is located just a few miles from the Cheyenne-Arapaho nation's Concho reservation (same telephone prefix and everything). And it's not like relations between the tribe members and the other local residents are always peaches and cream.

Back in October, HBO's Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel ran a story on similar efforts in California to eliminate Native American school mascots, but the story had a surprise twist at the end: in repeated polls of Native Americans nationwide, something like 80% of respondents either don't object to the mascots or actually like them. This Oklahoma bill wouldn't affect the "Indians" - in fact, it seems pretty clearly aimed at Tulsa's Union school district - but the whole process is still kind of fascinating to watch.

Josh Marshall, today:

We could have an honest debate about whether we'd be better off with Social Security or a system of government-regulated 401ks in its place. But the president knows that's a debate he can't win. So he's trying to scam the public into helping him destroy what the vast majority want to protect.”

Me, two years ago:

Again, the true debate is one the hard right is unwilling to have because it knows it will lose. The administration is now admitting that "weapons of mass destruction" was really just "the reason everyone could agree on" to go to war, a pretty plain admission that the war was decided on long before it was justified. For tax cuts, the hidden motive is to starve the government of revenue in the hopes of gutting the social programs that the vast majority of Americans want. If tax cuts slash the government's income by 50% or so, Congress will have to get rid of programs that the GOP hates, like education and health care for people who are obviously too inferior to afford their own. These are cuts the right could never get through on their merits, so they're trying to force them through the back door.

David Pogue has a blog-like page at the New York Times Web site called "Pogue's Posts." The Times provides an RSS feed for this technology page.

The URLs to each post inside the RSS feed are wrong, producing 404 errors at the Times Web site.

(This is on top of the site's tendency to change the GUID for very old posts on a regular basis, marking old posts as new every day.)

I'd think the best place to make glaring technology errors would not be on the technology blog, but that's just me. (None of this is David's fault, but it's still ironic.)