Thursday, May 23, 2013
The night Ted Turner managed the Braves
(espn.go.com)
Maybe Magic Johnson would like to try his hand in the Dodgers dugout?
Read More...Ted Turner was the “Mouth of the South,” “Terrible Ted” and “Captain Outrageous,” a brash, outspoken business mogul who had a golden touch.
He launched the first successful cable news network with CNN, sailed to victory in the America’s Cup and used his cable empire to turn his Atlanta Braves into “America’s Team.”
But 36 years ago this month, Turner discovered there was one thing he couldn’t do: manage his own baseball ...
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< 1 2On the reservation where I work, we have an 80% unemployment rate. There are people who don't have running water and telephone access. There are a shocking number of sex offenders who live there and we have high rates of crime. Many Native American's don't care about Native American mascots because they're trying to survive day to day. I'm assuming that you've never been to a reservation.
The problem with Native American mascots is that they completely overlook all of what I mentioned above. Instead people think of all Natives as "brave warriors" instead of people living in 3rd world type condition.
You seemed to answer that question yourself back in #34.
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Like the Shenandoah Hungarian Rioters, for example.
Yeah, that's a great example, but Baseball America's Encyclopedia of Minor League Baseball has hundreds of names that are almost as strange as that one. And for a year or two before World War I, the Cleveland Indians were often referred to in the press as the "Molly Maguires", which was a violent labor organization that flourished in the coal regions of Pennsylvania in the 1870's.
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Well I'm pretty certain that the Seminole Nation sure as hell is. You do understand that they're fully on-board, and in fact make money off of licensing and whatnot?
Definitely true, but I'd also hope that a few Indians out there somewhere were getting a little kickback from all those giant foam tomahawks being sold by the Braves.
As a white guy, I'd actually LOVE this.
I think you misread me. The pushback wouldn't be from Caucasians. The pushback would be from the African-American community.
I wouldn't call myself a "Braves fan," I call myself a guy who likes baseball and happens to live in Atlanta so that is the team I go see. If they changed their name to the "Crackers" I would be all in. I'd be a die hard.
You mean it wouldn't be from 'crackers'.
No, it would be from folks who would be offended by glorifying "whipcrackers" by naming the city's baseball team after them.
(While the term may or may not be definitively descended from "whipcrackers" it's a well established assumption and would generate a lot of noise. As much as the "screaming savage" image, certainly. And it would create a lot of anger and offense in a community that supports Atlanta and supports the Braves, not from a community academically concerned with the presentation of AmerIndian images in the nation at large.
I think you misread me. The pushback wouldn't be from Caucasians. The pushback would be from the African-American community.
Only among the academic element. The main pushback would be from people of all races who are satisfied with the name as it is, and from people who get the irony of the "Crackers" name but think that institutionalizing it would be kind of belaboring the point.
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No, it would be from folks who would be offended by glorifying "whipcrackers" by naming the city's baseball team after them.
Talk about an academic reaction. As if "Crackers" isn't understood to mean "poor southern whites in general" a thousand times more often than "whip-crackers" whenever the word is used. Hell, I've heard "old soda crackers" or "Saltines" used to refer to whites by black people more often than I've ever heard "whip-crackers". What you're saying is like imagining that at this point "Honky" still refers to a certain segment of Central Europeans, rather than to whites in general.
But in Gone with the Wind, which is a pretty accurate reflection of common white attitudes of the early 20th century, "Cracker" is not an insult. The character Will Benteen in that novel is a "Cracker," and portrayed as poor, respectable, a kind of upright, resourceful yeoman farmer. He marries Scarlett O'Hara's sister. Though not from a "good" family, he couldn't be further from the "white trash" of the novel (the Slatterys). "Cracker" is a highly positive term for poor-but-honest, hard-working whites in GWTW. As a sports nickname it was much closer to "Steelers" or "Packers," in the day, than it sounds to us now.
Exactly, though I'm not sure you can read that much into GWTW, since Selznick was trying to show the ante-bellum South in a positive light (marketing, my man), and there would've been little point in depicting any class divisions within the dominant caste that didn't advance the main theme or the main romantic plot. I think that the evolution of "Cracker" into a universally understood insult to southern whites came at the time that whites realized that the term was used by blacks almost as a synonym for all white people in general---which by the 1950's and 60's came to be the case. (Meaning when an insult was intended.)
And then of course there's the more obvious tit -for-tat reasoning that says "If I can't call you 'nigger' then you can't call me 'cracker'." Which is kind of understandable.
I've always just thought of them as the "Ramblers" or the "Catholics", and Merry Christmas to you.
I believe the term actually derived from poor farmers who "cracked" their own corn/grain (as in "Jimmy crack corn..."), rather the being able to afford to take it to a mill.
I was thinking of the novel, though, where "Cracker" is used prominently. Not sure if it appears at all in the movie (where Selznick, admirably enough, decided to omit "n#####," one of Mitchell's favorite words, as well …)
I was thinking of the novel, though, where "Cracker" is used prominently. Not sure if it appears at all in the movie (where Selznick, admirably enough, decided to omit "n#####," one of Mitchell's favorite words, as well …)
Never read the novel, though I had a black GF at Duke who said she'd read it three or four times and that it was her favorite book. (True story)
No, it's the word that gets him punched in the nose in Five Easy Pieces.
Honest question - What should be the primary point(s) of focus as a society so that these conditions start to improve?
With zero local knowledge, it sure sounds like "get the people some damn jobs" is the obvious answer.
Or Uggla jerseys.
Interestingly enough, the term "redskin" appears to have gained status as a racial slur fairly recently. See the article "I am a Redskin: the adoption of a Native American expression" by Ives Goddard in the journal "Native American Studies" vol. 19(2), p. 1-20 (2005). Uses of the term historically seem not to have been pejorative at least well into the 19th century and likely beyond -- Native Americans apparently referred to themselves as such on occasion during the 19th century and before. The one example sometimes cited as an early negative use of the word (a purported 1699 letter by one Samuel Smith) appears to be spurious.
You know what they say about assuming. They were pretty hard to avoid when I lived in New Mexico.
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