"Don't get me wrong, I found it more than a little heartening that the NCAA finally engaged the issue as a matter of organizational policy, recognizing (in a decidedly limited fashion) the import of power and process to the pleasures of play. The new policy, however, should not in my estimation be read as an anti-racist intervention. Quite the contrary, the so-called ban is something of a half-measure, a compromise (and compromised) position. It does little to highlight institutional racism, and refuses once more to reflect upon its own culpability.

The NCAA opts to frame the problem with Native American mascots in terms of hostility and abusiveness. I would concur that such imagery hurts and terrorizes people, normalizing, if not celebrating, forms of symbolic and systematic violence, which in this instance perpetuate hundreds of years of colonization and racialization.

This is not, however, what many Americans understand the new policy to be saying. As the NCAA policy makers speak about offensive attitudes and acts directed by misguided individuals at innocent victims, they reduce institutional racism to feelings, motivations, and affronts, making it an individual problem rather than a systemic one. The NCAA's ban individualizes and psychologizes social conditions and cultural systems, encouraging a kind therapeutic anti-racism that selectively treats a predefined and overdetermined "problem," not its historical foundations or lived manifestations."

Get the Story:
C. Richard King: It's a White Man's Game: Racism, Native American Mascots, And The NCAA (Black Athlete Sports Network 10/2)

NCAA Policy:
NCAA Executive Committee Issues Guidelines for Use of Native American Mascots at Championship Events (August 5, 2005)

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