This commentary is by Justin Mark Hideaki Salisbury of Burlington, Mi’kmaq and Passamaquoddy Indian, a graduate student in education at the University of Vermont. He has worked as a design laboratory assistant, economic research fellow, therapist, legislative aide, and teacher.
Vermont recently joined other states in banning racist mascots and likenesses. While these bans are important, the effect of the old mascots and likenesses will still go on.
Also, the effect of the mascots and likenesses coming from out of state will also go on. While we might have made it illegal for the Green Mountain Chieftains to continue, the Kansas City Chiefs are not directly affected. While the South Burlington Rebels mascot may have been retired, the apparel still lingers, so a lot of the effect is still lingering. The Ole Miss Rebels, again, are not directly affected.
I support the bans, but I write to encourage fellow antiracists to create voluntary opportunities for people to swap out racist apparel. People who participate should be praised for participating, not shamed for owning racist apparel.
In Vermont, many of us are familiar with carbon recapture, where we basically plant trees so that they will take carbon back out of the atmosphere. Here is an idea: racist apparel recapture. I will describe the idea for a school, but it is applicable to any public institution.
Schools can host an apparel swap. At your school, allow students, faculty, staff, and/or community members to voluntarily trade in racist sports apparel for some other kind of apparel. Some people might refer to this as a “buy-back” program, but I’m not talking about giving out money.
This idea is a tweak of an idea from East Carolina University, my alma mater. At East Carolina, we used to run T-shirt swaps to get other universities’ apparel off our campus. Whether it was UNC or NC State, we wanted to replace that apparel with East Carolina apparel, so we set up a T-shirt swap program.
At our annual end-of-year university-wide gathering, we allowed students to swap out another school’s T-shirt for an East Carolina T-shirt. We did this for any school, regardless of racism. We then had students who lived in faraway places, like Vermont, take those other schools’ shirts home with them and drop them off at a thrift store drop site in their home state.
Here, I focus the apparel swap on racist apparel from schools and sports teams. It is widely understood that mascots of Indigenous people, Ku Klux Klan members, and Confederate soldiers are racist. We can also look at the racism implicit in the San Francisco 49ers, Buffalo Bills, and other mascots.
Whoever runs a racist apparel recapture program will have to decide which team identities should qualify.
I do not think it is a good idea to donate racist apparel to thrift stores. That does not get it out of society. It needs to be destroyed. I would enjoy having a bonfire to destroy it all, but please at least cut it up so that nobody can ever again display it.
Nobody should be wearing a Galloping Ghosts or Red Raiders T-shirt. Also, two important groups are disproportionately lower-income folks: people of color and people shopping in thrift stores. Putting racist apparel into thrift stores is systemically racist.
Hot tip: if you learn that your school is doing this, go buy a cheap racist team hat or shirt at a thrift store, then swap it for brand-new apparel with your school logo. Thrift stores might develop the justice orientation to start destroying donated racist apparel.
After Michael Vick got dethroned for dogfighting, animal shelters were using his jerseys for dog bedding. Maybe we could do that with racist apparel.
Trading for apparel from your school puts more of your school spirit into the world and takes oppression out of the world. If you are a company that has your own apparel, use that. If you are a community organization, spread your logos.
Find donors or raise the funding to purchase the new apparel. Student government entities may choose to allocate some of their funding for such a program. Many schools have budgets for diversity programming; those budgets could be used for this kind of program. Be creative. If it’s a priority, you can find money.
At universities, this can start with a big apparel swap event for an educational spectacle, but it can become a standing program at campus bookstores. The funder specifies which replacement shirts they will buy, then pays the bookstore per each racist apparel item collected, just like scalps or redskins at a trading post. “We collected 10 racist T-shirts this month, so that will be $100.”
If you have some other kind of apparel that you would like to disseminate in exchange for racist apparel, go right ahead. I have been a lifelong fan of the Boston Red Sox, and I hate the New York Yankees. With that said, if everyone in Vermont swapped their racist apparel for Yankees apparel, I would be thrilled. The Yankees team identity does not contribute to the oppression of anyone as far as I know.
Within our existing spheres of influence, we can be the change that we want to see in the world. Bans can only go so far, but we can get rid of racist apparel with freedom and unity.