Yahoo Sports’ Major League Baseball page Big League Stew exemplifies why Yahoo is losing readership. Instead of sticking with their area of expertise, they venture too much into social justice warrior journalism. A case in point is Liz Roscher, who recently wrote that Pedro Martinez used an “offensive gesture” in an attempt to celebrate the Indians’ victory over the Red Sox.
Martinez, who is part of the TBS pre- and post-game broadcast, did a Native American war whoop in tribute to the team. Since athletes have compared their competition to battle since forever and Cleveland’s mascot is an Indian, it just makes sense to imitate a war cry after victory.
For someone to get offended by this just demonstrates SJW virtue-signaling, not concern for Native American honor or well-being. Roscher goes so far as to say that using an Indian face as a mascot is racist. According to her and her ilk, it is now offensive to even draw a person of color. I feel like I just woke up from a coma in the Middle East where people are told who they can and cannot depict in drawings.
It is especially irksome when people like her take offense at this but are silent about the fighting Irish mascot of Notre Dame or the Viking mascot for the Minnesota NFL team. Is it because they believe all Irish are violent or that all Scandinavians got on boats and raided the rest of Europe? I don’t think so. Yet not a peep of outrage.
I agree that if Native Americans don’t want to be caricatured as a sports logo then we should remove those logos immediately. There are far better things that could be caricatured to represent Cleveland. How about the Cleveland Fires?
As if Roscher hadn’t demonstrated her hate against the culture that has created everything she holds dear, she added a last parting shot. “It’s just a coincidence that the TBS incident happened on Columbus Day, a day that celebrates the man who didn’t discover America but just landed near it, and then decimated native populations.”
Roscher not only misses the point of the holiday but also excludes and misstates actual history. The holiday is a celebration of the fact that Columbus had discovered lands that were new to Europeans instead of landing in Japan like he intended.
This paved the way for other explorers to further Europeans’ knowledge of the world. Roscher leaves the reason out of the equation: why did Columbus set sail west? He was looking for a new way to procure the spices of India because Ottoman Turks and other violent Muslim nations had blocked trade. Following Roscher’s logic to its conclusion, blame for what happened to Native Americans after Columbus arrived could be laid at Muslims’ feet.
Finally, Columbus didn’t decimate native populations. European diseases for which Native Americans had no immunity did that. If he is to blame for that, do Europeans have the right to blame Asians for the fact that the Black Death wiped out a third of Europe’s population? Do you see how silly that sounds?
A word of advice to Yahoo: tell your writers to stick to their subject matter. We don’t need politics in our sports stories. We already get enough of that from all of your links to Hello Giggles, People, and Vibe. Taking a phrase from our SJW friends: make your sports pages a safe place for everyone. Please!
