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News :: Right Wing |
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White People Appropriate Cultural Icon On Behalf Of Land Grant University, Shrug Off Racism; Say: "If You Don't Like It, You Can Leave." |
Current rating: 0 |
by emmag
Email: mmagoldman (nospam) yahoo.com (unverified!) |
18 Nov 2003
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Pro-Chief on-line petition reads like a handbook of institutional oppression. |
An on-line support-the-chief petition:
http://www.petitiononline.com/savchief/petition.html
Click on 'View Signatures,' and you can see some of the reasons people give for wanting to keep "Chief Illiniwek" as the identifier/mascot of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. These are the reasons behind the effort to 'save' the Chief. These are the reasons. The university's fanning of this sort of blatent economically-backed bully-tactic "I don't need to understand your reality" priveleged racism should be jaw-dropping front-page news, not the overwhelming protests of it.
Though on-line petitions like this hold no legal water, the words of pro-chief folk wanting to keep their mascot are so powerfully self-libelous. And, as one of the top research intitutions in our nation, the University of Illinois' choice to ally with this sort of base, knowingly uninformed ethnocentric sentiment, rather than to educate against it, is simply shocking.
Sent to you from a very frightened in the trenches pro-retire-the-Chief north-end University of Illinois employee. I was emailed this petition by someone in my office. Almost all of my white, middle class co-workers and many white upper class upper admin folks (read: "big bbosses") are on this petition. I've never spoken directly of my stance on the Chief in the workplace. People fear for their jobs, for their sanity.
We live in scary times. |
