Ron Cook: Big Ben’s Manup moment is a revelation,
‘ ... it’s the perfect time’
With Roger Goodell and the National Football League flashing their newfound social justice muscles like they were posing for one of those before-and-after ads, the guy on the left has too much stomach and the guy on the right has rock hard abs, you have to wonder if anyone in the Washington D.C. area might finally have his interest piqued.
Anyone like Dan Snyder, majority owner, Washington Redskins.
“The longer he doesn’t move, the longer he’ll seem intransigent, but eventually he’s gonna move,” the decorated documentary filmmaker Aviva Kempner was telling me this past week. “I think it’s his natural stubbornness. A lot of people are against change. But it’s the perfect time. He would make it much easier on himself.”
Kempner, the Pittsburgh native who grew up in Detroit developing a passion for baseball along the parallel track of a capacious social conscience, was the creative force as well as the moral intensity behind both “The Life and Times of Hank Greenberg” and “The Spy Behind Home Plate,” the documentary about big league catcher Moe Berg, has a new project no one can say lacks for timing.
“Imagining the Indian,” which she’s directing and producing with Ben West, explores the fight against Native American mascotting.
“If you were to say to me at 20 years old, ‘Aviva, you’re going to wind up doing three sports films,’ I would have laughed in your face,” she said from her home in Washington D.C. “But there were never just sports films. Hank Greenberg was because my daddy loved him but more because I wanted to deal with anti-Semitism in America in that era, and Moe Berg was another kind of under-known Jewish heroes film, but a couple of
years ago (Washington Post columnist) Kevin Blackistone, who I know socially, asked me if I’d be interested in a project he was working on with Sam Bardley (who had film credits from ESPN’s “30 for 30” series).”
Interested? They didn’t realize they’d walked right into her kitchen. An activist in one sense or another for 50-some years, she’d started in VISTA in the ’70s working on Native American issues in New Mexico, worked in the Interior Department and later as a lobbyist for the National Tribal Chairman’s Association. Her only hesitation on this project was that she hated football (the only game she attended as a student at Michigan was to protest the Vietnam War at the Rose Bowl). Fortunately, baseball had already incensed her sufficiently on the mascot issue. The Indians and the Braves were not exactly Kempner’s favorite teams, but something that happened in the playoffs last year really resonated with her.
“There was great excitement around here with the Nationals,” said Kempner, a noted lobbyist for the bring-baseball-back to Washington movement. “But St. Louis was playing Atlanta and a pitcher for the Cardinals, Ryan Helsley, made a point in an interview.”
It didn’t get a ton of play nationally, but it went like this according to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
“I think it’s a misrepresentation of the Cherokee people or Native Americans in general,” Helsley said about the infamous tomahawk chop. “Just depicts them in this kind of caveman-type people way who aren’t intellectual. They are a lot of more than that. It’s not me being offended by the whole mascot thing. It’s not. It’s about the misconception of us, the Native Americans, and it devalues us and how we’re perceived in that way, or used as mascots. The Redskins and stuff like that.”
Those kinds of observations always got a hearing with Dan Snyder, and always got trumped by his default position on whether his NFL team would change its name. “NEVER,” he said in one interview some years ago. “And you can use caps.”
But June 2020 is a lesson in, among myriad other things, you never say never. The Redskins have just watched the removal of the statue “honoring” founder George Preston Marshall, who resisted employing a single Black athlete until his stadium funding was threatened by the Kennedy Administration in the early ’60s. At that time, his football team had been the only NFL franchise without Black players for a full seven seasons.
Also this month, the Washington Post editorial board called for Snyder to rid himself of racist branding. It’s a little incongruous that a franchise getting attention for supporting Black Lives Matter is clinging to such an outright slur as its nickname. Statues and monuments and misinterpretations of history are crumbling every day in this Summer of George Floyd. It couldn’t be more clear that it’s time.
(Note to Super Bowl Champion Chiefs: See above).
“I’m used to doing films (about subjects) that are 50, 100 years old,” Kempner said. “But all of a sudden, we’re living it. It’s another reason why I’m honored and grateful to do this film. Similar to the high number of coronavirus deaths in the African-American community, the Navajo community is suffering terribly as well. We’ve got to start saying to people that there’s income inequality in the Native American community as well and a discrimination that’s gone on and on, and our sports teams are part of it.
“What’s great is that a lot of young people are protesting these horrible mascots. In Cleveland, Chief Wahoo is no longer on the field although he’s still on the shirts, and I think the tomahawk chop will be eliminated by next year.”
Kempner’s films never fail to bring a blistering focus to uncomfortable facts. The one that likely struck her hardest in “Imagining the Indian” was that in the 100 years after Europeans arrived in North and South America, the population of indigenous people dropped 90% from violence and disease.
“I’m the daughter of a Holocaust survivor and I’ve lost all my grandparents during the Holocaust, so I real know, from a very personal point of view,” she said. “But to know this historically, and then to make fun of it? If you look at some of the old Washington football team games, the way they would have people dressing before it? It’s disgusting.”
You can see the trailer for Kempner’s latest project at imaginingtheindianfilm.org, a four-minute refresher on how it might be a good idea to stop trivializing and marginalizing entire races of people while we keep substituting tradition and heritage for real, hateful, and still perfectly modern history.