“Indians,” “Braves,” “Redskins,” “Eskimos”—and “Black Hawks”: The Sports Team Naming Controversies

By the end of the nineteenth century almost every Native American culture was either under severe threat or had been wiped out. But images of the supposed fierceness and savagery of “Indian braves” still retained a strong hold on the imaginations of white Americans, and in the early twentieth century it began to be common for sports teams in American cities to draw on that imaginative legacy in a context in which it was desirable to have an image of strength and courage, even of fierceness. In baseball the Boston Braves (later the Milwaukee Braves, and later still the Atlanta Braves) acquired that name in 1912; Cleveland’s baseball team was renamed the Indians in 1915; in football another Boston Braves team moved to Washington and became the Redskins in 1937. For decades now many have argued—with good reason—that there’s a strong case for changing team names of this sort, on the grounds that they stereotype Native Americans in one-dimensional fashion as fierce warriors. Arguably even more offensive are gestures such as the “tomahawk chop” of Atlanta Braves fans (along with its accompanying chant), or team mascots such as that which used to be pictured on the Cleveland Indians’ logo, Chief Wahoo, with his tomahawk eyes and ludicrously demonic grin. Tara Houska, an Ojibwe lawyer, expressed the view of millions when she called the image “a blatant racial caricature.”

Many school and minor-league professional teams that formerly had names such as “Indians” and “Braves” started changing those names in the early years of this century, but as late as 2015 no major league franchise had done so. Some claimed that such a move would entail renouncing a long, proud tradition in local sports. But—to take Cleveland as an example—Chief Wahoo had been part of the Cleveland logo only since 1947. Even the name “Indians” did not date to the beginning of the franchise, which before 1915 had been known successively as the “Lakeshores,” the “Bluebirds,” and the “Blues.”

The resistance to names that reference stereotypes of Native Americans grew slowly but steadily. Toronto Blue Jays announcer Jerry Howarth was one of the first within the major league baseball world to become persuaded. Howarth reported that he “stopped using team names like Indians and Braves and terms such as tomahawk chop and powwow on the mound after receiving a letter from an aboriginal fan after Toronto defeated Atlanta in the 1992 World Series.” Howarth described the letter in an October 2016 interview:

[It was] one of the best fan letters I’ve ever received. He said “Jerry, I appreciate your work but in the World Series, it was so offensive to have the tomahawk chop and to have people talk about the powwows on the mound, and then the Cleveland Indians logo, and the Washington Redskins.” He just wrote it in such a loving, kind way. He said “I would really appreciate it if you would think about what you say with those teams.”

Howarth wrote in reply that he would indeed stop using the offensive terms—and he did just that. Soon more and more sports people started coming round to his point of view—but many still resisted change. And, much more surprisingly, so did many Native Americans. Few if any Native Americans defend the use of the Chief Wahoo image by Cleveland, but an astonishing 90% of Native Americans surveyed by The Washington Post on this issue some years ago responded that they were not offended by the team name “Washington Redskins,” while 70% of Native Americans reported that they did not find the term “redskins” disrespectful to Native Americans in any context:

Across every demographic group, the vast majority of Native Americans say the team’s name does not offend them, including 80 percent who identify as politically liberal, 85 percent of college graduates, 90 percent of those enrolled in a tribe, 90 percent of non-football fans and 91 percent of those between the ages of 18 and 39.

Could this survey have been flawed in some way? Might it have been that respondents to questions posed by a Washington newspaper were so keen not to give offence to the questioner that they were reluctant to say that they found the name of the Washington team offensive? Certainly when asked what terms they themselves prefer to be called (rather than what terms they find offensive), Indigenous Americans did not and do not put “redskins” high on the list. But the survey certainly gave pause to those who had been confident that virtually all Native Americans would find team names such as “Redskins” offensive.

Many Native activists nevertheless argued that, regardless of what the polls might say, the use of names such as “Redskins” tended to indoctrinate North Americans—including Native Americans themselves—to think poorly of Indigenous peoples. An article reporting on the poll results also quoted Oneida Nation representative Ray Halbritter and other activists arguing strenuously that the NFL should not “continue marketing, promoting, and profiting off of a dictionary-defined racial slur—one that tells people outside of our community to view us as mascots,” and that can have a harmful effect on Native American children.

I have for years sided for the most part with Halbritter and Howarth on this issue—but I have also long felt that it’s an interesting issue deserving of full discussion. Was it patronizing for those in the white majority to call for the team name “Redskins” to be dropped when a clear majority of Native Americans are evidently not offended by it? Or are such terms offensive in themselves, even if a majority of Indigenous Americans are not offended by them?

Over the last few years a good number of the teams bearing these names have finally made the change. In 2022 Cleveland’s baseball team became the Cleveland Guardians, and Washington’s football team became the Washington Commanders. In 2021 Edmonton’s CFL team (formerly the Eskimos) became the Edmonton Elks. In Atlanta, though, the Braves have kept their team name—and the controversial “tomahawk chop.” Major League Baseball has supported them, arguing that “the Native American community in that region is fully supportive of the Braves’ program, including the chop.” In discussions of team names, it’s arguable that “Chicago Blackhawks” (or, as the team name was officially until 1986, “Black Hawks”) should be treated as a special case. Far from being an undifferentiated stereotype, the team name “Black Hawks” derives from a specific WWI military unit, the name of which was in turn derived from one of the most famous Native Americans—Black Hawk (or Ma-ka-tai-me-she-kia-kiak) of the Sauk Nation, whose 1833 autobiography has become a classic of Native American literature.

I’m a bit torn on this one, so I’ll end with a series of questions. Should this Chicago team name be treated as a special case? Or does the name “Blackhawks” still partake of some of the same stereotypes of Native Americans that so clearly are involved in names such as “Braves” and “Redskins”? The Sauk were forced from Illinois by white settlers; is it hypocritical for the descendants of those settlers to honor a Sauk historical figure now in that way? Or does that history make it all the more appropriate for fans of all backgrounds to pay homage now to a great leader of the past?

N.B. This is an updated 2022 version of a post from several years ago.

"Ag Gag" Laws: What Values Do We Value Most?

In many areas of the world trespassing is a relatively minor offence under the law—a misdemeanor rather than a felony—and offenders are liable to relatively minor punishments. The maximum fine for a first offence in the province of Alberta, for example, was until recently $2,000; for a second offence the maximum was $10,000. (Penalties for trespassing are typically the same regardless of whether the premises are a private individual’s home and yard, a business owner’s warehouse and parking lot, or a farmer’s field or farm buildings.)

But under the provisions of a bill rushed through the Alberta legislature by the Conservative government in 2020, an individual in that province who has been found guilty of trespassing is now subject to a fine of up to $10,000 for a first offence—plus six months in jail. A second offence is now subject to a fine of up to $25,000, plus a further six months in jail. An organization involved in sponsoring or directing an act of trespass is subject to a fine of up to $200,000. If one is deemed to have gained access under “false pretenses” (for example, by falsely saying as you start a job at a pig farm that you have no intention of taking photographs of any animals being abused), one is subject to the same penalties.

Why prescribe such harsh punishments for such a minor offence? The key is in another part of the bill, where it is specified that such penalties apply even when property is not fenced off and no notices forbidding trespassing have been posted—if the offence occurs on farmland or “on land that is used for the raising of and maintenance of animals.”

Alberta’s Bill 27 was the first Canadian example of a type of legislation familiar to many Americans as “ag gag legislation”—legislation intended to gag those who would inform the general public of what goes on behind the closed doors of the agricultural operations where the 10 billion or so mammals and birds killed every year in North America for human food live out their brief, unhappy lives.

As in many other North American jurisdictions, such operations in Alberta are in practice exempt from almost all provisions of animal cruelty legislation. Typically, such legislation prohibits only the causing of “unnecessary” pain, suffering or injury to an animal, and in many jurisdictions any practice, no matter how cruel, is allowed if it can be classed as part of “generally accepted” practices of animal management or animal husbandry. For those who may imagine that the industry would not allow cruel practices to become “generally accepted” in the industry, it should be pointed out that such practices have for decades included (to pick only two well-known examples) the confining of sows in crates so small that the animals can never turn around, and the confining of egg-laying hens in cages that allow them no more than 67 square inches of living space per bird.

It’s all too clear that allowing the industry to follow “generally accepted practices” leaves a vast amount of room for cruelty. But not enough room to satisfy the animal agriculture lobby. Over the past two decades and more, undercover operations at animal agriculture facilities across North America have revealed horrific examples both of what constitutes “generally accepted practice” and of abuses that exceed anything that could possibly be described as “necessary cruelty” or “generally accepted practice.” As Camille Labchuk, executive director of the organization Animal Justice, has pointed out, “whistleblowing employees are often the only way the public has to monitor the conditions animals endure on modern farms.”

Alberta is now only one of four Canadian provinces that have moved to criminalize such whistleblowing; Ontario Premier Doug Ford’s government has passed similar legislation, as have the governments of PEI and Manitoba.* In some cases the penalties prescribed are even more draconian than those in Alberta. Constitutional challenges have been launched, but for the moment, the ag gag laws of all those provinces remain in place—and Quebec is considering enacting its own legislation.

At the federal level, ag gag legislation has twice been introduced in Parliament. In 2021 Bill C-205 had passed second reading (with the Bloc Quebecois and—remarkably—the New Democrats joining the Conservatives in voting to give priority to private property rights over any concern for cruelty to animals). In the spring of 2022 Conservative agriculture critic John Barlow introduced a new ag gag law, styling it as a “biosecurity” measure. The powerful animal agriculture industry lobby continues to press both at the federal and the provincial level for ever more draconian measures against animal advocates.

I have touched already on what it is that the animal agriculture industry so determined to hide. It’s worth taking a longer look. Organizations such as the BC Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, Canadians for the Ethical Treatment of Farm Animals, Mercy for Animals, and People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals all provide on their websites descriptions and images that give a visceral sense of the lives these animals live. Many of these images, as you would expect, were obtained through undercover operations. Here is a description from the organization, Animal Justice, of what’s shown on video footage shot in Excelsior Farms, an Abbotsford pig farm in 2019:

The footage from Excelsior Farm showed mother pigs trapped in gestation crates with dead and dying piglets; pigs prodded in the face with electric current; untreated injuries; and workers castrating piglets without anesthesia. Although the footage was provided to law enforcement officials, no charges were laid against the farm. Instead, four animal advocates were charged with dozens of offences for allegedly entering the farm to expose suffering. [What’s shown on the video is far less sensational than the abuses captured on numerous other undercover videos of animal agriculture facilities, but it certainly has the potential to be shocking or disturbing, especially for those unfamiliar with the realities of today’s animal agriculture operations. For those who do wish to watch, here is a link to the Global News clip: https://globalnews.ca/video/5214345/disturbing-images-captured-at-abbotsford-pig-farm.]

More recently, Animal Justice has made public another video—this one revealing appalling abuses at a BC slaughterhouse. The same cautions apply as to the material being disturbing to watch: https://animaljustice.ca/exposes/bc-slaughterhouse

An update on the Excelsior case: in October of 2022 two of the animal advocates were sentenced to jail terms—jailed for a non-violent act of civil disobedience, the only goal of which was to bring to light horrific cruelty that otherwise would have remained hidden. In provinces with ag gag laws, advocates in similar circumstances could have been subject to a $50,000 fine in addition to jail time.

At stake here is not only the treatment of non-human animals, important though that is; it is also freedom of speech. A society in which whistleblowers are prevented from drawing the attention of the public to horrific abuses is a society that gives license to the powerful to do anything they please.

But surely, many may say, property owners have a right to do as they please on their own property; should we not do everything we can to protect that right? To be sure, we should recognize that a conflict of rights is involved here. If someone trespasses on land owned by someone else, private property rights are indeed not being respected. The question is, do we as a society hold private property rights to be our highest value? Or do we consider certain other values—and certain other rights—to be sufficiently important that they may trump private property rights?

Let’s imagine a situation in which those being abused are not calves and piglets and chicks but puppies and kittens—or human children. In any such scenario it becomes clear that we instinctively feel private property rights to be far outweighed by the rights of those being abused—and the right of the general public to know of the abuse. We probably feel as well that anyone who has reason to believe that such abuse is taking place has a responsibility to do something about it—to report the suspected abuse to the relevant authorities, or—if there are no authorities in a position to stop the abuse in a timely fashion, to take action themselves. We would regard it as irresponsible for anyone who comes across a parent beating up his child, or a dog-walker repeatedly kicking a dog in his care, not to take some action.

Perhaps many would prefer not to know the details of the cruelty routinely inflicted on farm animals. But the vast majority (even of those who eat animal products) say that they would prefer that farm animals be treated humanely up to the moment when they are killed. They are the consumers, and surely all those who wish to know have a right to know how the food they consume is produced. The public has a right to know—and, I would argue, the public and its representatives have a responsibility to do everything possible to stop the abuse. That’s particularly the case given that agricultural operations enjoy the benefits of considerable government subsidies—substantial expenditures of taxpayer dollars—in almost every North American jurisdiction. Yet governments in four Canadian provinces, just like governments in many American states, are doing everything possible to keep the public from knowing what’s going on, and are doing nothing whatsoever to stop the cruelty.

Animal advocacy and free speech groups are challenging the constitutionality of the Canadian laws, just as such legislation has been challenged in America. But the efforts of the animal agriculture industry lobby are outpacing those of the animal advocacy groups. In America, ag gag laws have been attempted in a total of at least 28 states; they have become law in a total of at least 11. Even in Iowa, where the state ag gag law was ruled unconstitutional in January 2019, the legislature within two months managed to pass a new ag gag bill. And in some states with ag gag laws—notably, North Carolina—the legislation is worded so broadly as to deter whistleblowing in almost any industry in almost any context.

Today’s media pay a good deal of attention to alleged threats to freedom of speech coming from progressives on university campuses; it’s time more attention was paid to the far more serious threats to the free flow of information that are coming from industry and from government.

*It’s worth noting that the provinces which have not passed ag gag laws win no prizes for cracking down on cruelty to animals or for treating whistleblowers fairly. Indeed (as the Excelsior Farms case discussed below goes to show), some of these provinces treat whistleblowers at least as harshly as the provinces with ag gag laws on their books.

The Sonnet at Salford: A Case Study in the Spread of Falsehood

How does misinformation germinate in today’s charged political climate, and how does it grow? A controversy that blew up in May of 2022 over the teaching of sonnets at the University of Salford in Britain provides an interesting case study. Here is some of what Rex Murphy (a columnist for Canada’s National Post newspaper) had to say on the topic as the manufactured controversy spread around the world:

Within the strict and limited form of the literary sonnet may be found some of the most exquisite and artistic creations of the poetic mind. They are the exhalations of literary genius. … To take these triumphs of the creative poetic mind out of consideration, and to lay on them the brand that they are “products of white western culture” and as such need to be “decolonized” (whatever that murk of a verb can possibly mean) is to commit a sacrilege against poetry and art. But such are elements in the idiot days we live in, that there is a university—at least that’s what it’s called, but names mean nothing in many cases—Salford, in England, where Shakespeare flourished and where Milton birthed his imperishable genius, which is doing just that.

Murphy’s 21 May column bears a combative headline (“How ridiculous is it for universities to sideline sonnets? Let me count the ways,”—and the subheading is even more ideologically charged: “In its wokeness, Salford University is pushing young minds away from some of the greatest artistic expressions the world has to offer.”

Murphy was one of several commentators who deplored this supposed “sacrilege against poetry and art.” The problem with these commentators’ claims? They were deploring something that had not in fact occurred.

What had in fact happened? Those in charge of a single course at the University of Salford—a second-year course in creative writing entitled Writing Poetry in the Twenty-First Century, not a survey of English literature—had decided to place less emphasis on the sonnet. Yes, this single course had indeed noted that such forms “tend to be the products of white western culture” (as they surely do indeed tend to be). But the sonnet had not been banished—not even from this one course. Previously, students enrolled in the course had been required to compose sonnets as part of both of the course’s two assessments (the work on the basis of which they were graded). After the change in the curriculum, they would still be required to compose sonnets (as well as sestinas and tankas), and one of the two assessments would still require students to submit both a sonnet and a tanka for assessment (with students having the option of submitting a third poem in a form of their own design). As Scott Thurston of the English and Creative Writing Department made clear, the only difference was that there would be slightly less emphasis in the assessments on the sonnet and especially on the sestina—though even in the case of the sestina students would still be required to compose in that form as part of their exercises. This was merely, then, a slight change in the way students would be assessed when it came to calculating grades for a single Creative Writing course. Far from taking the sonnet “out of consideration” across the entire university, Salford had not even banished it from this single creative-writing course.

How is it possible that such a thorough distortion of the facts could become so widespread? Part of the problem can be attributed to news media headlines, which are often written by a headline writer, not by the author or editor of each article. The first piece on the matter seems to be have been a 14 May 2022 report in the Daily Telegraph (often described as among the more respectable of Britain’s right-wing newspapers). The Telegraph piece was wrong or misleading in several respects, but it was far less misleading than the headline it was given: “University Sidelines Sonnets as ‘Products of White Western Culture.’”

Similarly, the article that followed a few days later in the Daily Mail (often described as among the less respectable of Britain’s right-wing newspapers) was correct—if misleadingly incomplete—when it quoted “Dr Scott Thurston, leader of the creative writing course at Salford,” as having said that “students would still be required to undertake exercises in composing sonnets.” You wouldn’t guess any of that from the Daily Mail headline, which blared out a more extreme story: “University of Salford Cancels Sonnets from Writing Course because they are Products of White Western Culture.”

When Google picked up the Daily Mail headline, it adopted it in an edited form. What you see first with respect to that Daily Mail article if you Google “Scott Thurston course – Salford” (as of 30 November 2022) is not the full headline but rather this shortened version: “University Cancels Sonnets over Concerns They Are “Products of White Western Culture.” The omission in the Google version of the phrase “from Writing Course” clearly suggests that the policy change was university-wide. Presumably the Google headline is more likely to have been crafted by Google software than by any human headline writer employed by Alphabet Inc.; either way, the result is pernicious.

But neither the Daily Telegraph and Daily Mail headline writers nor the Google headline software should shoulder the bulk of the blame. The most egregious acts of irresponsibility here are surely those of writers such as Murphy themselves. Could it be that the writers who followed up on the original Telegraph piece with their own articles deploring the University of Salford’s supposed change of policy did not actually read much more than the headline? Such carelessness is surely within the realm of possibility; many people have plausibly suggested that there’s more and more skimming and less and less actual reading in today’s digital world.

It’s hard not to conclude, though, that ideology often dovetails with carelessness in such cases. Take, for example, the coverage accorded the incident by Maggie Kelly in an online publication called The College Fix—a publication that appears to be very largely dedicated to the fight against “political correctness.” Kelly begins her article with a sentence that references the Telegraph report and that, though somewhat misleading, is at least limited in its claims: “The University of Salford, a public university in Greater Manchester, England, removed sonnets and other “pre-established literary forms” from a creative writing course assessment, The Telegraph has reported.” Again, the headline above goes much further: “University drops sonnets because they are ‘products of white western culture.’” Could The College Fix be a publication large enough to have a staffer dedicated to headline writing? It hardly seems likely. Kelly is identified not only as the author of the article but as the “assistant editor” of the publication, which leads one to believe that at the very least she would have had to approve the publication of such a grievously untruthful headline. Evidently The College Fix is so concerned with attacking alleged political correctness that they can’t be bothered with the old-fashioned sort of correctness—the sort that regards it as important to get one’s facts right.

How difficult might it be for anyone who is interested in this matter to establish the facts? As is often the case with such outbreaks of disinformation, getting at the truth of the matter simply by Googling is not that easy. It’s far, far easier to find the misinformation repeated* than it is to find at least partial information about the second year Creative Writing module where it is posted on the University of Salford’s English and Creative Writing website. Even if you have the patience to go four or five pages down when you’re googling “Salford – sonnet controversy,” you’re not likely to find online the information that gives the lie to the screaming headlines of the right-wing publications.

Fortunately, the Internet isn't the only source of information. The University of Salford is a public institution, Scott Thurston’s email address is easy to find, and, as I discovered myself, Dr. Thurston responds politely and helpfully to inquiries. But it's surely something of a grim commentary on the state of the media today that it can be almost impossible to access anything like the full truth about certain news items without going directly to the source.

*The following were among the sites that were spreading the false information as of 30 November 2022: the Best American Poetry blog; the Classical Poets.org website; the Redstate news website; the headline USA.com website; flipboard; the European Conservative.com; MSN (the Microcoft news portal); and Res ipsa loquitur (the blog of Jonathan Turley).

Why We Call Other People -phobic—and Why We Shouldn’t

Why do we use the terms that we do to describe different forms of dislike, or prejudice, or hatred? The most straightforward are terms that use the Latin prefix anti-, meaning against. Beginning in the seventeenth century (with the term anti-Catholic), making use of the Latin prefix anti- in this way was the standard English-language approach to describing speech or behavior expressing prejudice against a specific group. By the nineteenth century, as discussion of prejudice grew, the language correspondingly expanded; anti-Jewish, antisemitic, anti-Negro, anti-black, anti-German, anti-Muslim—these and other such terms were all coined in the nineteenth century.

In the twentieth century, a new trend arose—the practice of employing in such contexts words with -phobia or -phobic embedded within them. We began, in other words, to use words meaning irrationally fearful of to denote language or behavior that is expressive of hatred towards. Particularly since 9/11, a common term for those engaging in anti-Muslim speech or behavior has been Islamophobic. In similar fashion, homophobic has (according to Google Ngram) come to be used roughly twice as often as anti-gay as a term used to describe those engaging in anti-gay speech or behavior. And transphobic is used roughly ten times more frequently than is anti-trans.

With the exception of xenophobic, words using the -phobic suffix did not take root until the late 1960s and early 1970s. The first known appearance of the word homophobic in print was on 5 May 1969—just a few weeks before the Stonewall uprising. As the New York Times has reported it, Dr. George Weinberg (who has claimed to have thought of the term some years earlier) was in touch “with the gay activists Jack Nichols and Lige Clarke, who used the new term in a column they wrote for Screw magazine, … discussing the fear felt by straight men that they might be gay.” By the end of the year the word had appeared in Time magazine as well, in a feature article entitled “The Homosexual in America,” and by the early 1970s these ideas were being widely discussed both in psychological circles and in the broader community. Everyone was suddenly aware of the degree to which the most virulent forms of anti-gay speech and behavior could often be found among men who had repressed or denied within themselves a powerful desire for sex with other men; their hatred for men who did express such desires was plausibly said to be rooted in a fear of having to confront the full nature of their own sexuality (this in an age when same-sex desire remained largely taboo). Before long the term homophobic had come to be widely used not just of men who were conflicted about their own sexuality but of anyone who expressed anti-gay feelings—and that remains the case today.

The rise of Islamophobic is similarly understandable. Until the late 1990s (again, according to Google Ngram) Islamophobic was a word almost never used; anti-Muslim was used more than a hundred times more frequently. Starting in 1994 (just after the first attack on the World Trade Center) Islamophobic began to be used with increased frequency, and usage began to soar following 9/11. By 2020 Islamophobic had still not overtaken anti-Muslim, but it seemed well on the way to doing so. Once again, hatred was plausibly linked to fear—in this case, fear not of suppressed desires lurking within, but of external threats. Much as the voices of reason pointed out again and again that the terrorist acts were the work of a tiny minority, and should in no way be taken to reflect on all Muslims, fear of terrorism came to be linked in many minds with negative feelings towards all of Islam, and all Muslims.

It’s easy to understand, then, why we have come to use words such as homophobic and Islamophobic so frequently to describe hate-fueled language and behavior. But should we? Are they in fact better terms to use than are anti-gay, anti-Muslim, and so on? Or are they—as they seem to me to be—deeply problematic?

It’s on two grounds that they seem to me to be the wrong words to use as umbrella terms describing deep feelings directed against a particular group. The first is accuracy. The suffixes -phobic and -phobia in words such as homophobic and homophobia are, like so many words relating to medical or psychological conditions, borrowed from ancient Greek—in this case, the ancient Greek word for fear. But a phobia, as the word has taken root in English, is not just a fear; it’s an irrational or unjustified fear. Someone who reacts with extreme fear when they see a large spider is not considered to suffer from a phobia if they live in an area in which tarantulas or other deadly spiders are common; it’s if they exhibit such fear when spiders pose no danger to them that they are considered to suffer from arachnophobia. And, it may well be added, a good many people who do not fear spiders nevertheless act towards them in an unnecessarily cruel fashion, killing them upon encountering them inside their homes when they could as easily (and almost as quickly) shoo them outside. Where spiders are concerned, then, the negative attitudes and behaviors that humans so often display toward them are not always linked to fear.

We should ask this, then: do people whose behavior is expressive of hatred towards Muslims always behave in that way out of fear of Muslims? Do people whose behavior is expressive of hatred towards gay people always behave in that way out of fear of gay people or gay sexuality? That some people act in such ways largely or primarily out of fear is unquestionable. It may indeed be that fear is at the root of such behavior most of the time, for most of the people who act in such ways. But for all of the people who act in such ways? And for all of the time when they act in such ways? We know that there can be various other motivating forces for such behavior. Disgust, for one; the deep-rooted disgust among many humans regarding a variety of sexual practices that are foreign to them has surely been to at least some degree connected to anti-gay feeling. The teachings of a variety of Christian denominations, for another: over the course of many centuries Christians of many stripes were taught that God disapproved of the sexual acts that gay men practiced, and that God would send the heathen Muslims straight to Hell. To be clear: prejudice based on disgust or on the wrong-headed teachings of certain religions is no more defensible than is prejudice based on fear. I raise these examples merely to show that it is inaccurate to use terminology that suggests that fear is at the root of all such prejudicial behavior, all of the time.

But even if it were the case that all such behavior were motivated by fear all of the time, using terms that imply hatred to be based always in fear seems to me to be unwise, simply because it seems likely to be counterproductive. Our aim should surely be to reduce anti-gay sentiment and behavior, anti-Muslim sentiment and behavior, and so on—to persuade those who hold such views and who act in such ways that they are mistaken in doing so. But if the terms we use to name such behavior carry within them a presumption as to its motivation, that is surely likely to make persuasion more difficult. Those who are accused of Islamophobia rather than of anti-Muslim behavior might, not unreasonably, ask How can you presume to know my psyche? And they might go on to ask, not unreasonably, Isn’t that typical of the arrogance of the university-educated liberal elite—presuming to know what motivates the beliefs and actions of anyone who does not hold the same set of beliefs that they do?

As a test case, it is worth considering a situation in which strongly negative feelings towards a particular group are clearly appropriate. Let’s take the feelings that our parents or grandparents typically held towards Nazis, and that most of us today hold towards the members of neo-Nazi groups. In holding such feelings and in speaking out against or taking action against such groups, we are expressing anti-Nazi feelings and behavior. How appropriate would we feel it to be if we were described as Nazi-phobic for acting in these ways? Surely we would feel it to be highly inappropriate. It might well be that our parents or grandparents did fear that Hitler’s Nazi regime would succeed in taking over much of the world. And it might well be that people today in France or Italy or America do fear that neo-Nazi movements may take power in those nations. But however much our opposition to Nazism or neo-Nazism may be accompanied by fear, our fear is not the reason for our opposing them. If we were termed Nazi-phobic instead of anti-Nazi, our response would surely be, Fear is not the point! I’m not against Nazi movements because I fear them; I’m against them because I believe what they do to be wrong.

The substance of anti-gay feeling and anti-Islam and anti-trans feeling is of course very different from the substance of anti-Nazi feeling. But there can be no question that many who speak and act against gay and Muslim and trans people do so because they believe it is right to do so—just as we feel that it is right to speak out against Nazism and anti-Nazism. If we are to have any hope of persuading them that they are wrong—and, to be clear, I believe we should try our utmost to do so—we are unlikely to further our cause by using terminology that focuses not on their words and actions in themselves, but on our presumption as to the underlying psychological state that motivates them.

Some who have argued in favor of using terms such as homophobia and Islamophobic have suggested that we should choose homophobic over anti-gay because the use of the latter represents a misguided effort to find a neutral term to describe something hateful. But we can make it clear in myriad ways that we find certain sorts of speech or behavior repugnant and immoral. When we use a neutral descriptive term such as violence in a phrase such as violence against women, it surely does not imply that we are taking a neutral stance in response to such violence. No more so can it be taken to imply that we are taking a “neutral” stance in response to anti-gay language or behavior if we condemn anti-gay slurs and anti-gay violence. We do not have to label it homophobic to make it abundantly clear that we oppose anti-gay speech and anti-gay behavior.

Others have suggested that to use any other terms than homophobia and Islamophobia is to deny that such things are largely rooted in fear. It is no such thing; to use anti-gay instead of homophobic (and anti-Muslim or anti-Islam instead of Islamophobic, and anti-trans instead of transphobic) is not to deny that these things are very often based in irrational fear; it is rather to acknowledge that they are not always rooted in such fear. And—perhaps most importantly—it is also to acknowledge that using terms such as homophobic and Islamophobic can be counterproductive. The practice of using language that associates all hatred with fear tends inevitably to infuriate and alienate those we say we want to persuade (or to “educate”). If we say we want to foster greater understanding and tolerance, we should strive to use terms that do not work against our declared aims—terms, for example, such as anti-gay and anti-Muslim, which presume nothing about psychological motivations. Using such terms may not do anything to make us feel more righteous, but it will be more accurate—and it will have the practical effect of breeding less hatred, not more.

Night Owls at the Ballpark

Friday, August 5, I was one of almost a thousand fans at Serauxmen Stadium to see the Night Owls win big over Port Angeles; the sun was out, a nice breeze was blowing, the beer was cold, the sausages and veggie dogs and tacos were perfectly cooked (and the food and beer line-ups not too long), Hawaii’s Tobey Jackson cranked a towering home run over the Green Monster for the Owls and B.C.’s own Seth Gurr pitched six shutout innings as the entire team played well, and it was in every way a glorious night at the ballpark.

There were quite a few of those in late July and early August, as the team was winning their share, the weather was perfect, and the crowds were growing. It was so great to see, after such a terrible run of bad luck earlier in the season—injuries to key players, a tough schedule, and, worst of all, a seemingly endless run of bad weather—cool and wet weather followed eventually by unbearable heat. Only near season's end did we start to get a full taste of just how great it can be to have West Coast League baseball in Nanaimo.

It can’t have been easy for the players—and it can’t have been easy for management, either. It’s worth remembering that the coming of West Coast League baseball had been completely disrupted by the pandemic and hugely complicated by myriad issues with upgrading historic Serauxmen Stadium. Full credit should be given to Jim Swanson and the ownership group, to the rest of the management team, to the players, to the local citizens who have been acting as hosts for the players, and, not least of all, to the City of Nanaimo; Mayor Krog and City Council had the good sense to approve the relatively modest expenditures required to upgrade the stadium, and City Manager Richard Harding and his staff worked efficiently with all the parties involved to make everything happen.

Here's hoping that Nanaimo’s business sector as well as individual fans will buy season tickets for next year—apparently they are already available. Let’s all do what we can to bring many more summers of glorious nights at the ballpark to Nanaimo!

Change for the Better

“Everyone always pays with plastic now”—you hear it constantly. But of course it’s not true. For one thing, there are still a good many Luddite oldsters like me who still use cash for the odd purchase. But there are also a lot of people who don’t carry plastic—people who are very poor, people who are homeless, people who don’t even have a bank account. It’s largely for that reason that we should make a point of always carrying some cash—all of us, that is, who don’t always say no to those asking for “spare change,” or to those who entertain us by busking on our streets. Imagine New Orleans or Nashville without street musicians; that vision could well become a reality if we give up carrying cash.

But it’s not just homeless people and street musicians who need us to be able to offer them small amounts of cash; it’s also a great many people who have traditionally depended on tips for a significant part of their income. Our tendency has long been to think of tips mainly in connection with dining out—and especially, in connection with dining out in sit-down restaurants. Over the course of the pandemic that perception shifted somewhat, as take-out and home delivery from restaurants became more and more popular. We grew much more used to adding 10% or 15% or 20% as a tip to the bill when paying with plastic in those situations. But there’s often no option to add a percentage when we buy fast food; the only way to tip those low-paid workers is usually with cash. And the same is true of the low-paid workers who clean your hotel room, or who do a range of other low-paid jobs. In an ideal world those people would simply be paid a living wage, and tips wouldn’t be needed. Sadly, we’re a long way from that sort of transformation; without the few dollars left with a hastily scrawled “thank you” on the bedside table for the hotel housekeeping worker, and without the fifty cents or dollar thrown in the tip jar for the fast-food worker who just served us, those people will struggle even more.

Let’s make their lives a little easier instead of a little harder. And let’s save street music in our cities. Let’s always keep a few coins in our pockets, and a few small bills in our wallets and purses. Change for the better.

The Protagonist of My Novel Is a Young-ish Working-Class Mother; I’m not. Is that OK?

One of the first questions people may ask about Lucy and Bonbon is this: as a matter of ethical principle, should someone such as me be writing such a book? The leading character, Lucinda Gerson, is a woman; I’m not. Lucy is working class; I’m not. She’s thirty-ish, and I am a very long way from that.

Another significant character, Ashley Rouleau, is a woman in her early twenties, from an economically privileged background. I come from an economically privileged background, though not quite as economically privileged as Ashley’s. But I am even farther away in age from Ashley than I am from Lucy. And one other thing; she’s black, I’m white.

Is it OK to write about people who are in numerous respects so different from the author? Or should writers, as the expression goes, “stay in their lane,” and write about people like them?

In a special category is Lucy and Bonbon’s second title character. Is it Ok for someone such as me to write in the voice of someone who is half human and half of another great ape species? That is of course an absurd question. Imagine the alternatives: it would be as ridiculous to say let’s leave it to the hybrids to tell their own stories as it would be to say Mary Shelley should have left it to the creature to tell his own story. But it’s not absurd to ask such questions where characters such as Lucy and Ashley are concerned. Working-class thirty-ish mothers and young women from economically privileged Toronto backgrounds exist in abundance in real life and are quite able to write their own stories, or stories about people like themselves. They certainly don’t need a sixty-eight-year-old white guy to try to do it for them.

So what’s my justification for writing characters of that sort into Lucy and Bonbon?

To answer that question, it may be helpful to try to disentangle the issue of “staying in one’s lane” from two related issues. One is the issue of representation in publishers’ lists. When I was young, the people whose fiction was published in North America (and in much of the rest of the world too) were overwhelmingly white—and disproportionately male. Thankfully, that has changed dramatically. There is surely still room for further change in some areas.* Overall, though, there can be no question that women, people of color, and people from minority backgrounds of almost every sort are far better represented on publishers’ lists than they were when I was young. Conversely, there are fewer “spots available” on publishers’ lists for people like me. It’s much harder than it used to be for a privileged, straight, white, aging male to get published—and that is a change entirely to be welcomed!

But that’s a separate issue from the question of who it should be considered OK to write about.

So too is the issue of appropriation of story material a separate question. When I was young it was often seen as entirely unproblematic if a white author “borrowed” an Indigenous myth or story as raw material for fiction—and there was rarely or ever any thought given to consulting anyone from the relevant Indigenous group. Thankfully, those days are long gone!

But that sort of appropriation is also a separate issue from the question of whether or not it should be considered OK to write about people other than those in the group(s) to which an author belongs.

So why is it these days widely considered to be a highly dubious practice to write “outside your lane”? I think the explanation is in part tied in with the way in which the issue of representation of authors from different backgrounds on publishers’ lists has been approached. As publishers have signed more and more fiction writers from minority backgrounds, publishers (and readers) have tended to develop expectations that these authors will be “telling their stories”—writing thinly veiled autobiography or, more broadly, telling stories about people from their own communities. And from that has developed a broader expectation that literature itself is fundamentally rooted in humans telling their own stories.

There is of course nothing wrong with people telling their own stories through fiction; many of the finest works of fiction unquestionably fall into that category. But a great many others do not. Most writers of fiction have considered one important function of literature to be imagining the lives of others—trying to understand the thoughts and feelings of others, and trying in doing so to craft characters and plots that will excite the sympathetic imagination of readers. So it is that our literary heritage includes characters such as Shakespeare’s Othello and Austen’s Mr. Bennet and Fitzwilliam Darcy and Shelley’s Victor Frankenstein and Eliot’s Edward Casaubon and Tertius Lydgate and Wharton’s Newland Archer. So it is that the literary descriptions of war that have been most highly praised as realistic include works such as Tolstoy’s War and Peace and Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage—both written by novelists who never themselves saw a battlefield. So it is that the most moving fictional depictions of poverty include works such as Mary Barton by Elizabeth Gaskell—who was herself always comfortably middle class. So it is that the character whose thoughts and actions portray the workings of racial prejudice among white people perhaps more persuasively than any other—Dr. Melville in Paul Dunbar’s “The Lynching of Jube Benson”—is the imaginative creation of a black writer. So it is that one of the most moving portrayals of a woman in an abusive heterosexual relationship, Roddy Doyle’s The Woman Who Walked into Doors, is by a man. So it is that the most memorable fictional representative of the tragic stuffiness of mid-twentieth-century British notions of one’s proper place in society—the butler Stevens, in Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day—is the creation not of an author raised in the stuffiness of mid-century British class consciousness but of one raised first in Japan and then in a Japanese family in the UK.

Those are all classics of previous centuries. It’s in the twenty-first century that the “stay in your lane” ethos has truly taken root in literary communities in the Western world, but even in this century some of the most impressive works have been by authors who have been following whatever path their imagination blazed rather than staying in their lane and writing about people such as themselves. I can’t think of two finer twenty-first century novels than Jo Baker’s Longbourn and Andre Alexis’s Fifteen Dogs. Baker—a university-educated woman who grew up in comfortable circumstances in the late twentieth century—has given us an extraordinarily persuasive fictional depiction of nineteenth-century servant life. Alexis—a black novelist whose family immigrated to Canada from Trinidad and Tobago when he was four—has given us an extraordinarily persuasive fictional depiction of non-human animals and their relationship to humans of any color (which along the way manages to provide wonderfully illuminating non-canine perspectives on life, love, and death). Authors such as these are emphatically not telling their own stories and “staying in their lane”; they are, above all, imagining the lives of others.**

Among twenty-first century dramatists, I can’t think of any writer more accomplished than Lynn Nottage; a black woman raised in comfortable middle-class circumstances, she has vividly brought to life the lives of working-class people—white as well as black, male at least as often as female.

In citing these examples, I don’t for a moment want to suggest that imagining worlds different from those one knows best is innately superior to bringing imaginative life to the world one does know best. A great deal of outstanding twenty-first century fiction writing is unquestionably by writers who have given imaginative life to characters from backgrounds similar to their own. (Examples that come immediately to mind include NoViolet Bulawayo’s We Need New Names, David Chariandy’s Soucouyant and Brother, Douglas Stuart’s Shuggie Bain, and Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones.) In no way do I want to disparage great writing of that sort; my aim is merely to point out that a great deal of fine writing has also come from writers who have not “stayed in their lane.” In the end, authors should surely be judged not on whether or not they have “stayed in their lane” and written about people like themselves, but on whether or not they have succeeded in creating an imaginative world (whether a realistic imaginative world or a fanciful one)—an imaginative world in which the characters feel believable, an imaginative world that engages readers’ attention, an imaginative world that leads readers to think, and to feel. Often that will be a world very like the one the author inhabits, but often it will be quite different.

I should make clear that, in writing Lucy and Bonbon, I did not set out to write a piece of fiction about a working-class mother and a privileged young black woman. I set out to write a novel about a child who is half human and half of another great ape species—and to explore what the life of such a person might say about how humans relate to other animals. My imagination then took me to a place where the characters Lucy and Ashley took shape. Looking back on it now, it seems natural that I would have been led, in writing about the prejudice Bonbon is subjected to on the basis of his biological background, to create characters who are subjected to other sorts of prejudice (whether it be on the grounds of class or race or gender). I hope that my imagination has been able to bring Lucy and Ashley to life successfully, just as I hope my imagination has been able to bring Bonbon successfully to life. And I think there’s a good chance that may indeed be the case—as I know it would certainly not have been the case had I tried to do the same when I was young, and had far less experience than I do now of a wide range of people and their circumstances. But that’s just me. Some authors are able even when young to write brilliantly and persuasively across gaps of gender and age and class and race and culture. Some are comfortable at any age only in writing about people like themselves, and do that brilliantly—whereas I can only imagine what a hash of it I would make if I tried to write an autobiographical novel. We’re all different, in short—and that’s a good thing.

Let me give the last word to Henry Louis Gates, whose fine short essay on this topic (based on an address he gave at a PEN America gathering) appeared last October in The New York Times Magazine: “Whenever we treat an identity as something to be fenced off from those of another identity, we sell short the human imagination. … Social identities can connect us in multiple and overlapping ways; they are not protected but betrayed when we turn them into silos with sentries.”

*This seems to me to be particularly the case when it comes to representing working class points of view. There are precious few working-class fiction writers being published—indeed, there may be fewer being published today than there were in the mid-twentieth century, when issues of class were on more editors’ radar screens than were issues of race or gender or sexual orientation.)

**It is so often expected that novels by black authors will focus largely on race that I feel I should perhaps provide a gloss here; in asserting that Fifteen Dogs is not an example of an author telling his own story, I do not mean to suggest that there is nothing in the book to do with race. Interestingly, race is not a significant issue with the human characters in the novel; we are never even told the skin color of Nira, Miguel, or other humans. (Worth mentioning, however, are asides such as the interesting reference to skin color in this description of a bathroom, as observed by Benjy, one of the dogs:

And then there was the room where the humans bathed and applied chemicals to themselves. The bathroom was fascinating, it being astonishing to watch the already pale beings applying creams to make themselves paler still. Was there something about white that bought status? If so, what was the point of drawing black circles around their eyes or red ones around their mouths?)

It is with the dogs themselves that serious issues of color briefly arise in the story, as Alpha dog Atticus declares that “the black dog” is “not one of us,” and his ally Max opines that, in that case, “it would be better to kill him.”

Open Book Interview about Lucy and Bonbon

It's been too long since I posted on this blog; with Lucy and Bonbon soon to be published, I'll try to post several times over the coming weeks.

I was interviewed about the novel recently by Open Book. That interview is posted online at https://open-book.ca/News/Don-LePan-on-Exploring-the-Thin-Divide-Between-Human-Non-Human-in-His-Thought-Provoking-New-Novel. Why did I dedicate Lucy and Bonbon to a parrot? It's all in the Open Book interview.