What’s In A Shame

Stolen Land, Ruined Lives

Turtle Island
June 25, 2020

Aunt Jemima is finally being retired for blatantly obvious reasons that have been blatantly obvious for a very long time. Similarly, Uncle Ben will be joining her in retirement. One cannot help but wonder how it is that the overtly racist name/logo of the National Football League’s Washington, DC franchise, which I will not include here, can escape the current scrutiny brought down on so many others by the lynching of George Floyd by Minneapolis police and the Black Lives Matter protests covering the globe?

Let me say today, on the anniversary of George A. Custer and his 7th Cavalry getting their asses handed to them by Sioux and Cheyenne Indians in the Battle of the Little Bighorn in Montana in 1876, that is long past time the football mercenaries representing our nation’s capital ditch their disgusting name and logo.

Along with all the other hateful racist slur imagery, the name of the team I’ve been calling Washington Racists’ has got to go. Their chosen name would be bad enough anywhere in the nation built on land stolen via genocide, but in the nation’s capital? Really?

Bruce Cockburn – Stolen Land

Or maybe you’d prefer a live version…

 

Before Chrump’s stormtroopers attacked them with teargas…oh, I’m sorry – pepper spray – and clubs, and the reporters witnessing this tableau were ordered to vacate Lafayette Park in Washington, DC, protesters attempted to take down the statue of genocidal monster, and favorite past president of the current White House occupant Andrew Jackson. Donald Chrump and Andrew Jackson had similar personalities. It seems likely that had Chrump been alive in Jackson’s time he would have gladly owned slaves and happily seen to the mistreatment (at best) of the native peoples he would have seen as worthless and in his way. Jackson should have been removed from Washington, DC while in office, before he became a statue.  Thankfully, there is a less-than-zero chance that anyone will ever erect a statue of the current president.

Except maybe this:

Or this… 

An unrepentant slaveowner, Jackson was responsible for the infamous Trail of Tears, the forced removal of tens of thousands of Indians collectively referred to as the Five Civilized Tribes (the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Muscogee, and Seminole tribes) from the American southeast in order to clear the land for plantations run on slave labor. Indian removal was Jackson's top legislative priority upon taking office, something he had been championing for more than a decade before becoming America’s seventh president. Approximately 4,000 Indians perished during this death march and all of their lives were essentially destroyed, as this nation’s original inhabitants believed they were literally inseparable from their homelands.

And the team that purports to represent our nation’s capital continues to flaunt their racist logo and name. At least they weren’t called the Washington Jemimas.

Patriotic American attempting to rid public
land of one more memorial to a genocidal racist

I. Mangrey reporting. This land is your land, this land is my land, but first it was their land.