Political Correctness Not What It Used to Be: In Twist, Tribe Fights to Keep College’s Fighting Sioux Sports Team Nickname

Political correctness is just not what it used to be.

It used to be that in diversity situations the lines could easily be drawn between those who got it and didn’t. For example, those who stood by minorities in what they believed was their cause would clearly know who they were standing for and why.  But today’s rapidly changing cultural diversity arena is challenging old assumptions about what the diversity battle lines are and aren’t.

Case in point is this article in the New York Times, In Twist, Tribe Fights for College Nickname. The debate at about 30 college campuses over the past several years has had Native American groups confronting universities about  their use of sports nicknames such as the Fighting Illini, the Redmen, and Chieftains. While the debates on campus were heated, the arguments for and against dropping the Native American names were predictable. To be for diversity was to be unequivocally supportive of doing away with the names. And to stand fast in resistance to the change was interpreted as not being supportive of diversity in principle.

But at the University of North Dakota it’s a group of Native Americans who are fighting in court to preserve the Fighting Sioux sport team name and logo, an image of a Native American in profile and feathered headdress. 

The arguments to keep it center on the distinction between nicknames such as Redmen and Savages and logos that  are clearly demeaning, even racist, on the one hand and on the other hand actual names of tribes that for many is a source of pride such as Sioux and Navajo. But the story also reveals the complexity of various issues in diverse communities themselves. In this case the debate also is between different Native American groups that is more about intragroup politics than about diversity.

The fact that diversity issues may be getting more difficult to sort out in simplistic ways is indicative that diversity and inclusion issues are moving from being peripheral to being more core about who we are. In the Obama Era we are seeing this play out in various ways such as the increasingly complex dynamics between the first black president and the African American community. Or in the dynamics of second and third generation Latinos who are English dominant yet are embracing their cultural roots even more tightly than their parents had encouraged them to do. Or between Boomer and Millennial women in their sometimes clashing views of what it means to be a female leader. Or between openly gay people who choose to make an issue of their sexual orientation identity or not.

Bottom line: these more complex diversity times require even deeper self examination of our own points of views on various inclusion issues because the politically correct handbook with the straightforward answers has become outdated.

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