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Diversity bosses in Washington state accused a student council of promoting white supremacy for suggesting a mural of hammer-wielding Norse god Thor could represent their school team. Students at Mountain View High School in Vancouver offered a mural of the god - whose name translates as 'thunder' - to decorate a wall in a newly renovated building as their senior gift. Its team is nicknamed 'The Thunders' and there is already a Thor statue in the school's main entrance. But the AI image they came up with horrified the district's equity office which demanded the god be removed or accompanied...

The profile of a Native American man, a braid trailing down and feather jutting up, is tiled into a high school hallway, dyed into the weight room carpet and laid into the turf of the football field at Salamanca city schools. School leaders say the omnipresent logo and “Warrior” name for the school athletic teams are sources of pride here, in the only U.S. city built on land leased from a Native American reservation. But as New York joins states moving to ban schools’ use of Indigenous nicknames and mascots because they diminish Native cultures, the tribe may have the...

New mascot, Archie, replaces white sword yielding man, Highlander.

The mascot for a Chuck E. Cheese restaurant in New Jersey has become the latest costumed character to be accused of racism. The incident on July 30 occurred when Natyana Muhammad took her children to the chain's location in Wayne, New Jersey - and the employee playing Chuck E. Cheese allegedly ignored her daughter during a meet-and-greet period. She posted a video of the encounter to Twitter which shows the employee walk past as a small child holds her hand out for a high-five. Muhammad wrote of the incident: 'My 2-year-old was racially discriminated against.' 'As you can see, he...

You probably can expect a "woke" campaign that will demand the U.S. Air Force rename its Thunderbirds exhibition flying team, those pilots who take America's jets into the skies and fly wingtip to wingtip at hundreds of miles per hour to promote the nation's military expertise. That's according to an editorial in the Denver Gazette, which recently highlighted the fact that the Thunderbirds were providing an aerial demonstration flyover, as they usually do, at the graduation at the U.S. Air Force Academy at Colorado Springs. It explains that Colorado has created a commission to banish such names from the state....

Plaintiffs’ attorney: “We’re proceeding to discovery in the district court later today and waiting on the final scheduling order, but in any event will be filing a motion for summary judgment in February. A Native American Group sought an injunction halting what they said was a discriminatory Colorado ban on the use of Native American Mascots. We covered the story in Native American Lawsuit Challenges Colorado Ban On Native American “Mascots” As Discriminatory: The banning of Native American (American Indian) depictions for sports teams gets a lot of press, most famously the Washington Redskins renaming themselves the Washington Football Team....

He’s male. He’s Scandinavian. He’s considered by some as “too masculine” and “too aggressive.” And now, he might be getting canned. No, I don’t mean me. I’m talking about Victor E. Viking, who has been the mascot at Western Washington University in Bellingham for 99 years. According to a report from June of 2021, WWU’s Legacy Review Taskforce is “concerned about the harm caused by asking all members of the Western community to identify with a figure that is potentially exclusive on the basis of both ethnicity and gender.” Already, in December, the task force convinced the university’s Board of...

DENVER (AP) — A North Dakota-based organization representing Native Americans sued Colorado this week for a measure banning American Indian school mascots which was passed last year amid a nationwide push for racial justice following George Floyd’s murder in Minneapolis. The lawsuit by the nonprofit Native American Guardian’s Association was filed Tuesday in U.S. District Court, naming Gov. Jared Polis, Attorney General Phil Weiser and Kathryn Redhorse, the executive director of the Colorado Commission of Indian Affairs. The firm is representing a John Doe, Jane Doe and three other Colorado residents who cite Native American heritage in the lawsuit. The...

DENVER — A North Dakota-based organization representing Native Americans sued Colorado this week for a measure banning American Indian school mascots which was passed last year amid a nationwide push for racial justice following George Floyd’s murder in Minneapolis. The lawsuit by the nonprofit Native American Guardian’s Association was filed Tuesday in U.S. District Court... ...The suit argues that the complete erasure of Native American imagery is not beneficial and that the use of positive and respectful Native American symbols and mascots in schools honors the group, helps neutralize offensive stereotypes and teaches the public about Native American history. ...

The Washington Football Team, which dropped its controversial name a year ago, has banned Native American garb from its stadium. Washington has banned fans from wearing Native American headdresses or face paint to games at FedEx Field this season, the team announced Wednesday. Washington will hold a practice at the stadium Friday with approximately 20,000 fans expected. It will be the biggest crowd since the home finale in 2019, which means it will be the largest gathering in the stadium since the organization announced in July of 2020 it was dropping its old name and seeking a new one. It...

U.S.—The new unemployment numbers are out, and they're pretty discouraging: among ethnic mascots of baseball teams and corporate brands, unemployment has skyrocketed 800% in the past year. "These are troubling signs for the BIPOC mascot community," said leading economist Dr. Matais Zendejas. "We had made so much progress, with mascots of all ethnicities being welcomed by the American public. But now it seems they are being fired at record rates, with the mascots and brand icons being replaced by genderless, white, inoffensive mascots, or else by nothing at all." "It's really not a good time to be a mascot of...

Two families are suing Universal Orlando after an actor dressed as the “Despicable Me” character Gru flashed a white power symbol while posing for photos with biracial children. The lawsuit filed on the behalf of two girls, who were ages 5 and 6 years old at the time of the photos, alleges that they suffered humiliation and mental anguish from the separate episodes at the theme park in Orlando, news station WKMG reported. One of the incidents occurred when the 6-year-old girl met the movie character at a breakfast hosted at Universal’s Loews Royal Pacific Resort in March 2019, according...

He was ill-mannered and ill-spoken—a boor, a braggart, a ruffian, a bigot, a hick, and a trickster. His name was Brother Jonathan. Today he is all but forgotten—eclipsed by his upstanding uncle, Sam. But after the Revolutionary War, Brother Jonathan was the personification of the newly independent American people: clever, courageous, not all that sophisticated and proud of it. He was the everyman incarnate. It was the everyman who had led America to victory. And now America looked to the everyman to lead them out from the bloated shadow of Great Britain. During the nation’s first hundred years, America tried...

VALPARAISO, Ind. -- Valparaiso University announced Thursday that it is dropping the team name Crusaders, the school mascot and all logos associated with the term that it said has been embraced by hate groups. The decision comes after a decadeslong debate that had intensified recently because groups such as the Ku Klux Klan began using the symbols and words. The school's faculty and student senates each passed resolutions calling for the change and the university's alumni board of directors supported reassessing the appropriateness of the team name. The Crusades were a series of bloody religious wars starting in the 11th...

Emory & Henry College in Virginia has announced to students the school will re-examine its wasp mascot. Why? The bug may appear “exclusive” to students who are not White Anglo-Saxon Protestants, or “WASPs.” While a public outcry over racism continues around the nation, the college is already concerned that its two historical namesakes — Methodist Episcopal Church bishop John Emory and founding father Patrick Henry — were slave holders. The school mascot has also come under scrutiny. “Conversations must examine how Emory & Henry’s past has contributed to current and ongoing systemic oppression,” said Dr. John Wells, president of Emory...

Sydney Eicher waits with her newborn son to hear any news from her husband, Joe who is serving in the Army. Lately, their conversation is about a dog named Ragnar.  "They were on a mission and they went to this house and dog was in really bad shape," Eicher said.  She says her husband’s unit found Ragnar tied up in a compound while on a mission in a remote area of Afghanistan. One soldier, Sergeant First Class Josh Lott, traded rations for the dog.  "He had a lot of fleas and stuff,” Eicher explained. “He was really malnourished. They had to do...

The Philadelphia Phillies are doing more than just competing for a place in this year's baseball playoffs. On Friday, the club filed suit in New York federal court over an attempt to grab ownership to the "Phanatic," the team's mascot. According to the complaint, Bill Giles, Phillies' executive vp, created the vision for the mascot in the 1970s — a green, fat, furry, big-nosed character accessible to children. The team says it worked with a company called Harrison/Erickson to develop the costume for the Phanatic. The firm was paid $215,000, according to the complaint. Dave Raymond, an intern in the...

KILLINGLY, Conn. (WTNH) The future of Killingly High School‘s nickname is still unclear as of Thursday morning. During a meeting on Wednesday, the school board decided to table the vote on whether to change it. For more than 80 years, students there have been called the “Redmen.” Their mascot is a chief wearing feathers, but now that could come to an end as some are calling it racist. “It’s more of a pride and honor thing. We respect what we wear. I wouldn’t wear something I don’t respect!” Killingly is not the first local town to take this up. Manchester...

Gritty, the bright orange, furry, 7-foot creature of Philadelphian origin, is no longer a simple mascot for a hockey team: Antifa activists have co-opted him as their own. In fact, they so effectively claimed Gritty as a working-class, leftist icon that the Wall Street Journal was forced to publish an anguished op-ed Monday demanding that these people keep their “Marxist hands off Gritty.” “The same leftists who want statues of Thomas Jefferson removed are now petitioning for Gritty to replace Mayor Frank Rizzo on a downtown mural,” Jillian Kay Melchior said in the Wall Street Journal op-ed. “Gritty belongs to...

Japan's Hayabusa2 probe, which has been circling the 3,000-foot-wide (900 meters) asteroid Ryugu since late June, deployed two little "rovers" called MINERVA-II1A and MINERVA-II1B at 12:05 a.m. EDT (0405 GMT) today (Sept. 21). The event occurred when the mother ship was about 180 feet (55 meters) above Ryugu's pockmarked, boulder-strewn surface, mission team members said. "The separation of MINERVA-II1 has been confirmed! The state of the spacecraft is normal," JAXA officials announced via Twitter just after the rovers deployed. That confirmation came after an apparently tense descent for Hayabusa2 flight controllers. "In the control room, you can hear the sound...