From NYT Daily Briefing 7/6/2020
IDEA OF THE DAY: RACIST MASCOT PSYCHOLOGY
A team of leading psychologists once conducted an experiment to see how popular images of Native Americans — like sports logos — affected Native American high school and college students. The psychologists first showed the students the images and then asked a series of questions.
The students mostly used positive words, like peaceful and kind, to describe the images, which included the Cleveland Indians mascot and Pocahontas. But when the researchers then asked a series of follow-up questions, the study took a more negative turn. Students who had seen the images reported lower self-esteem and more negative views of their community compared with a control group of similar students who had not seen the images.
The problem was not that the images were purely negative, the psychologists suggested. It was that they reminded students of the very narrow public portrayal of Native Americans — stereotypes of warriors of an exotic race (who were ultimately defeated and killed in large numbers). The mascots “function as inordinately powerful communicators, to natives and nonnatives alike, of how American Indians should look and behave,” the psychologists wrote.

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