Saints, 13-0! That's a big deal. And with that kind of record comes more eyeballs looking at the team. More eyeballs equals increased scrutiny. That's great, and yet, somebody had to take it too far. The folks over at TexasLiberal.wordpress.com suggest that longtime Saints mascot, dubbed Sir Saint, but known to many simply as Big Chin Guy, should not be white, since most players in the NFL are black, and because New Orleans and Louisiana have a history of racial strife. Really? Nice logic.Dude, I'm a proud liberal, and you're even pissing me off. Talk about the politics of distraction. You could change the color of every mascot in the NFL and it's not going to help one person in the lower 9th Ward. It won't fix one levee, it won't improve one public school, it won't abate the systemic racism that exists in New Orleans, or Louisiana, or anywhere else. We're not talking about a truly offensive nickname like "Red Skins" either. It's a giant cartoon character! And you're preaching this from the racial paradise that is Texas? Try focusing on the real problems that affect people's lives, and stop diluting their cause with this kind of drivel. From the article:
You can say that Sir Saint is just a silly football mascot and who cares what he looks like?Yet in a place with as nasty a racial history as Louisiana and New Orleans, the decision as to what color the football mascot should be implies something. Especially when the mascot does not look like the majority of players on the field.
Read the article here.
Thanks for the link. At least it was not the dumbest thing you saw all week.
ReplyDeleteWell, it's only Wednesday.
ReplyDeleteWow, I can't believe our friend TL commented here. Truly, this guy is a blog troll. Of course, I can't say a lot for some of our more, ahem, red-shirted (to use a somewhat mixed athletic metaphor) brethren who are commenting on the TL post. They aren't helping our case at all. I guess we should be glad they at least took a break from reading Going Rogue to defend their team.
ReplyDeleteI'm fairly certain there are lots of things that you could find to trump this one for "dumbest" but why try? Sometimes gifts like this fall from the sky.
Ol' TL offers pithy one-line retorts to many of his post's commenters, but offers up no response to why he isn't calling out all the other white mascots. Also, I don't think anyone made clear that "Sir Saint" was one of the team's original logos, going back to the 1967 debut. He was only recently brought back as a logo, and we also have the new "human-stuffed" sideline version. Not that it really offers an answer to TL's question of why he's white, other than he was white in 1967, at a time when there would have been no question as to what color he was (not that there's anything "right" with that, to paraphrase Seinfeld).