There’s a company called Shelf Life Clothing which makes T-shirts mocking the Chief Wahoo logo, changing the caricature to a white person with blond hair and writing “Caucasians” in the Cleveland Indians script. These shirts have been around a long time — I wrote about them at my old Shysterball blog back in 2007 — but they’ve recently made the news again.
Back in June, the DJ for a Canadian group consisting of three Ojibwa Indians called A Tribe Called Red wore the shirt in some publicity photos and it led to a bit of a dustup in which people called him racist. Which is a special kind of unhinged — calling the guy wearing the shirt which critiques and satirizes racism racist — but I’ve learned to never be surprised when it comes to this stuff anymore. The dustup has died down, but the effect of it has been fun:
A hot fashion item this summer on Ontario First Nations’ reserves is a T-shirt with the lettering “Caucasians” and the grinning logo of Chief Wahoo, the much-derided mascot of the Cleveland Indians major league baseball team . . . T-shirt maker Brian Kirby of Shelf Life Clothing in Cleveland said the “Caucasians” shirt has been his most popular seller since he began making them in 2007, but interest “skyrocketed” after the Deejay NDN controversy, especially after the story hit Reddit and Facebook.
“We have had over 3,000 shares on posts about the tee in the last month, and have been working around the clock to keep up,” Kirby said.
That’s unexpected. Because I’ve been told by so many people that, in reality, no one cares about Chief Wahoo, most Indians feel “honored” by their images and iconography being appropriated by sports teams and that the politics of race and sports mascots is purely a function of liberal white guilt and pinkos like me wishing to push our agenda.
Hmm. Guess not.
