Chris Rickert: Wisconsin school made right call on racist images

As long as there’s even one student whose learning environment improves because of a new Madison schools policy banning clothes with “Native American team names, logos or mascots that depict negative stereotypes,” then school board members were right to ban them.

The hardship of not being able to wear, say, a Chicago Blackhawks jersey to school is a minor one, after all, and public school students simply aren’t entitled to the same free speech protections the rest of us are.

But as often happens in the drive to protect everyone from being insulted at any time and on any basis — be it race, religion, gender, sexual orientation or any of the other items on the growing list of intrinsic human identifiers — the policy is destined to come with a few caveats.

Those who argue against Indian mascots and logos point to research suggesting that such depictions lower the self-esteem of Indian students and raise the self-esteem of non-Indian students — a dynamic that Robert Munson, a member of the Wisconsin Indian Education Association, says creates circumstances ripe for bullying.

The depictions say to Native Americans that other people “don’t think of us as people who have a distinct history,” Gabriel Saiz, a member of the West High School Native American Student Association, told the school board last month.