“Super
Bowl Idolatry” is the title of a blog article I posted in January 2015, and
I stand by what I wrote in that posting that has been viewed more than 1,650
times. But I must confess, I watched the Super Bowl this year for the first
time in many, many years. Quite reluctantly, I am a Chiefs' fan.
Cheers for the Chiefs!
There is
hardly anyone of my Thinking Friends in this country, or even in Asia, I
assume, who doesn’t know that the Kansas City Chiefs won an exciting
come-from-behind victory in Super Bowl LIV on Sunday evening, Feb. 2.
Since June and
I have lived in the Kansas City metropolitan area for 14½ years now, I confess
that we got caught up in the hype and even June, who never watches football
games, watched the game with me along with our daughter Kathy and her husband
Tim. We had a fun Super Bowl party of four.
I also must
confess that at halftime, with the score tied and the momentum clearly on the
side of the San Francisco 49ers, I predicted that the Chiefs were going to
lose. June said I shouldn’t be so pessimistic--and she was right.
Who would have
thought that the Chiefs would score more points in the 4th quarter than the
49ers did in the whole game! I had underrated “Mahomes’s magic.”
One reason why
it is easy to be a Chiefs fan now is because of Patrick Mahomes, the young
quarterback who has had an amazing beginning to his career as an NFL
quarterback.
Mahomes (b.
1995) seems like such a fine, personable young man, it’s hard not to be a fan
of a team that has a quarterback like him.
Jeers for the Chiefs
While I have
various negative feelings about football in general and professional football
in particular, and while I have even more negative feelings about what I have
called the idolatry surrounding the Super Bowl, the rest of this article is
about the problematic name of the Kansas City team--as well as the name of
their Super Bowl opponent.
The Chiefs’
name is a problem because there are Native Americans, and their sympathizers,
who think that the name is racist. I realize that there are Native Americans
that have no problem with the Chiefs’ name--or with the name of the 49ers or
even the Washington Redskins. But some/many do.
Cyberspace
brought to my attention several articles highlighting the problem. I read, and recommend,
this
1/27 article in The Washington Post, this
1/29 article in The New York Times, and especially this
2/1 NBCnews.com article by Simon Moya-Smith, a Native American.
The two
articles I was most influenced by, though, were this
2/1 Vox.com article and this
article from a website I hadn’t previously heard of. The former was written
by Rhonda LeValdo, an Acoma Pueblo woman who teaches at Haskell Indian Nations
University in Lawrence, Kansas. Her article begins, “The Kansas City Chiefs’ chant
isn’t a tribute to people like me. It’s racist.”
The latter
article by Zach Johnston in Uproxx.com is titled “Why Both Super Bowl Team Names Should be
Replaced.” He forcefully points out the racism ensconced in both names, Chiefs
and 49ers. (If you read just one of the linked-to articles, I suggest
this one.)
The adult
Sunday School class I am currently attending is discussing the Doctrine
of Discovery. In our discussion on Super Bowl Sunday, I suggested that
perhaps next year we might want to plan for some consciousness-raising about the
Chiefs’ name, especially if they are in the Super Bowl again (which is a
distinct possibility).
Maybe the time
has come for more of us to be at least as concerned with the fair treatment of
Native Americans as with watching/enjoying a football game.
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