Rarely do sports leagues take the time to face up to the racism that their enormous popularity has been built on. The National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) is as guilty of this as its professional peers – perhaps more guilty, as it bears the burdens of both athletic and academic legacies of racism. This week the NCAA had the opportunity to take a step towards addressing some of the racism, historic and current, that plagues the league. Unfortunately, the Association failed to take a decisively anti-racist stand.

The Association’s executive committee ruled that they would no longer allow “hostile or abusive” school nicknames or mascots at post-season events. Specifically, the prohibition targets schools with nicknames that are racist towards Aboriginals. School nicknames mentioned in the executive’s press release range from the University of Utah “Utes” and the University of Illinois “Illini” to the Carthage College “Redmen” and Southeastern Oklahoma State University “Savages.” The report named 18 schools in total that would have their nicknames and mascots banned from post-season events.

It is important to note that the NCAA did not rule that these schools could not use these offensive nicknames, nor did they rule that the schools would not be allowed to compete in any NCAA events with these mascots or nicknames. Instead, they ruled that they were not allowed to use these racist symbols in post-season tournaments.

The NCAA undoubtedly chose post-season events because they are the nationally visible. For schools like Southeastern Oklahoma State University, tournaments like the NCAA men’s basketball tournament (March madness) would likely be the only time their athletic nickname was exposed to national attention. For the NCAA, it is these high profile events that are most dangerous, in a public relations sense.

Beyond this limited ban on offensive mascots, the NCAA also urged schools to decide for themselves to follow the “best-practice” example set by the Universities of Iowa and Wisconsin, both of which refuse to schedule athletic competitions with schools that use Native American imagery in their programs. But by limiting their censorship to these few events, the NCAA has missed the chance to really challenge member schools, and even their professional peers, to abandon the practice of employing offensive nicknames and mascots.

Some sportswriters have asked whether this is really an issue. The founder of the American Indian Anti-Defamation Council, Russell Means, has compared the practice of naming American sports teams after Native groups to contemporary German soccer teams being named the “Jews,” “Hebrews,” and “Yids,” and using as symbols the horrible caricature from the Nazi’s anti-Semitic press of the 1930s[1]. There is no doubt, as Means’s example demonstrates, that the practice is racist.

It is also not limited to professional and collegiate athletics. The use of racist symbolism is popular among amateur teams as well, in Canada and the United States. The effect of racist team names on children is far more insidious than the presence of these symbols among adults. The NCAA and professional leagues need to eliminate their racist nicknames, especially because it will add strength to campaigns to end racist symbolism within amateur sports as well. Unfortunately, the NCAA’s first stutter step this week does not go nearly far enough. Much more is needed to address the racism that is still so pervasive in both the college and the larger sports world.

[1] Taken from Ward Churchill, “Let’s Spread the ‘Fun’ Around: The Issue of Sports Teams Names and Mascots,” in Ward Churchill, Acts of Rebellion: The Ward Churchill Reader, (New York: Routledge, 2003), 219-222.

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