Cambridge board needs to go back to school
Another review for `The Last American Editor’
The Front Page
Morning Update
Wednesday, July 14, 2021
By Ken Tingley
For the past year, the Cambridge community has deemed its most important school problem to be - its mascot. That says a lot.
Not far away in the community of Loudonville, Siena College shed its Indian mascot 43 years ago because it believed it was offensive. This is not a new issue for schools in the United States and Canada, and the fact that Cambridge is only getting around to addressing it in 2021 is kind of embarrassing. Glens Falls High School - another school with an Inidian nickname - should take note.
What’s worse, it speaks to the lack of consideration for people who might be different than the mostly white, rural community in which they are so proud.
The United States Commission on Civl Rights weighed in on this issue in 2001 as did the American Psychological Association in 2005. Both agreed with many Native American organizations that such mascots and images “maintain harmful stereotypes that are discriminatory and cause harm by distorting the past.”
Discrimination and abuse of Native Americans is well documented in our history - they still teach that at Cambridge, right - but for some reason Cambridge believes it is different.
The NCAA adopted a policy to eliminate “hostile and abusive names” years ago and dozens of schools followed suit. You can see the list HERE.
Back in June, three brave members of the school board voted their conscience and eliminated the nickname despite enormous community pressure. Their votes came despite the fact that two new board members - Dillon Honyoust and David Shay Price - were elected because of a promise to keep the nickname and mascot.
So the vote was reversed last week and Cambridge returned to a 1950s mindset.
I hope the two board members have other skills because the board of education is responsible for more than pep rallies.
In the past year, the NFL’s Washington Redskins dropped their nickname and the Cleveland Indians have promised to do the same. New York State asked schools to give up their Native American nicknames “as soon as is practical.” Of course, that was 20 years ago.
The National Congress of American Indians even addressed the issue with the Cambridge Board of Education with a letter before the most recent vote.
I found this part of their argument compelling:
“Further, and crucially, Native people are not mascots. Regardless of the professed intent of such a mascot, Indian Country has long held a unified opposition to the `mascotization’ of our communities and NCAI, a formal, national Congress of Trial National, has passed numerous consensus-based resolutions, taking back more than 50 years., confirming this position.”
That seems pretty clear to me. Yet, the Cambridge school board believes it knows better.
Ultimately, it is a black eye for the community.
Some more feedback
This is what Pulitzer Prize winner Mark Mahoney is saying about “The Last American Editor:”
“In reading Ken's columns, even many years after they were written, the reader gets a snapshot of a community and its people and their place in time. That's because Ken Tingley was one of them. He belonged to them. And through each of his columns, it's very clear that they belonged to him. Ken Tingley was more than a columnist for their newspaper. He was their conscience. Their advocate. Their friend.”
Mark and I worked closely at The Post-Star for more than a decade and he is now the editorial page editor for the Schenectady Gazette.
I wish they would agree with the NCAI. Maybe they could allow the people in Cambridge to vote on it.
The more Cambridge digs in on this the more racist they appear. It’s one thing when they could claim they didn’t know any better but their ignorance has now become willful. Every legitimate Native organization has condemned this and called for an end. Every psychological association and every child development group has called for a ban. There is no reason other than belligerence to keep using Native people for their amusing mascot.