Connecticut town hugs a racist mascot
There’s about 17,000 people living in the town of Killingly, and, although the town is 93.1 percent white, there’s a decentsized Laotian population, the result of a bighearted family named O’Leary who, 40 years ago, began sponsoring desperate Laos families trying to get out of the refugee camps.
What there are not, in Killingly, are very many Native Americans or First Nations people or — what’s the other term? — Redmen. The 2010 census found 0.4 percent of the town’s population to be Native American. Killingly’s high school mascot is (or was) the Redmen, and its football team has a war bonnet spreading across its helmets.
In the course of 2019, Killingly’s Board of Education has (a) voted to ditch the mascot and replace it with the Red Hawks (b) seen Republicans attain a 63 supermajority in a November landslide that seemed to have, at its core, the mascot controversy and (c) voted last week to ditch the Red Hawks mascot and (d) subsequently deadlocked in a tie vote over restoring the Redmen mascot. So the high school football team, currently storming toward another championship, is the Fighting (Mascot To Be Determined)s.
The Asian population of Killingly is more than four times as big as the Native American segment, but there is no proposal to call the team the Yellowmen. The black population is three times as big, but there are no plans to call the team the Blackmen.
That’s because Yellowmen and Blackmen are patently offensive names. Somehow, Redmen could be OK? Apparently. Former Connecticut state troubadour Hugh Blumenfeld blew that idea out of the water in 1995 with a song called “Talking Hypothetical American Pastime Blues” which fantasized about a game between the Detroit Negroes and the New York Jews.
At last week’s contentious Board of Ed meeting, the arguments spilled into the hallways. The Norwich Bulletin reported that a man named Paul Kazlauskas got into it with an antimascot woman. He called her a “liberal communist.” She called him a racist. He subsequently said, “I’m getting fed up with that word.”
I know, right? It’s wearying when people keep calling you a reductive word that begins with “r” and has negative connotations. I don’t blame Kazlauskas for being sick of “racist” after a few weeks, and I don’t blame the tribal nations for being fed up with “Redmen” after 100 years or more.
A lot of these troubles would dissipate if we could somehow make adult life for average white people more rewarding. I’ve covered a few of these battles over high school mascots, and they’re inevitably driven by beefy middleaged guys looking like “Redmen” has more to do with their resting blood pressure than their specific take on King Philip’s War.
When they talk about “tradition” or even (hilariously) “our heritage,” what they’re really saying is “high school represented the best years of my life.” Pull up the lyrics to Springsteen’s “Glory Days,” and you’ve got the whitehot energy dot that makes these controversies burn. Time slips away and subtracts way more than it adds. And then one day a guy at the diner tells you that the most potent symbol of your youth is actually a toxic, demeaning caricature. And that forkful of brisket turns to wormwood in your mouth.
So maybe you buy a MAGA hat and find out when the next municipal election is. You elect a new Board of Ed whose core competency may lean a little more heavily toward sweatshirt logos than is ordinarily healthy — which, ironically, could have negative implications for the education of your kids and grandkids. Because you decided the most important pedagogical issue was the name of the football team.
But Killingly has reached for nuance during this debate. During the summer the board directed the superintendent to ask the most locally relevant tribal nation, the Nipmucs, what they thought about the mascot. A nice gesture, even though the Nipmuc nation had already, in 2016, issued an unambiguous, strongly worded denunciation of all Native American sports mascots as “directly tied to the history of genocide in this country against our people.”
But who knows? Maybe they changed their minds, right?
No. They still don’t like it. Neither do the Mashantucket Pequots. I don’t know if the Mohegans have weighed in, but they’re pretty busy right now hosting the Miss America pageant at their casino. Which could be considered progress. Unless you think the Miss America pageant is also degrading.
My WNPR colleague Frankie Graziano interviewed a 1987 Killingly High alum at the hearing, Tammy Wakefield, who said “To be honest with you, I would rather be a warrior than a bird.” There’s a Simon and Garfunkely money quote for you! Wakefield said the old mascot inspired fear in rival sports teams.
And right there is your problem. Even though there are plenty of people with Native American roots who are OK with ferocitybased mascots, there are even more who sense something pernicious about the implication that Indians are more warlike than other folks.
I mean, if the team were the Killingly People Who Were Living Close to the Land But Failing to Develop Immunities to Fatal European Diseases, we’d be having a different conversation.
Speaking of which, just as the Killingly furor was cresting, archaeologists uncovered a 12,500yearold Paleoindian site in Avon, the oldest ever found. It was full of weapons, of course.
Just kidding. Mostly tools.