Mascot News | Native American House | University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

The Racist Mascot from Urbana-Champaign: Why You Should Still Boo Illinois

by Francis Boyle
Professor of Law
Updated 12-28-07

The self-styled "Fighting Illini" of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign were on their way to the January 1, 2008 Rose Bowl with their racist and genocidal mascot and symbol Chief Illiniwak still in tow. Although the NCAA forced the University of Illiniwaks to prevent this Little Red Sambo from desecrating at half-times everything American Indians hold dear and treasure, nevertheless Chief Illiniwak still remains the officially designated "honored symbol" of the University of Illiniwaks at Urbana-Champaign. Just recently the University of Illiniwaks resurrected Chief Illiniwak for the Fall 2007 Homecoming in order to better milk their Alumni/ae as part of their newly launched Capital Campaign, thus definitively proving their craven racism for crass commercial purposes. In his "Year 501: The Conquest Continues" (1993) Noam Chomsky suggests an apt metaphor for such American Indian sports mascots and symbols that I will elaborate upon here in order to conform to our local and most peculiar rites on this campus:

Suppose the Nazis had won the Second World War. Sixty years later, a prestigious German state university has a mascot for all of its sports teams and sports fans by the name of "The Rabbi." Basically what happens is that a student from the Hitler Youth League dresses up in an authentic costume for an Hasidic Rabbi, complete with the curl-locks and beard. The University itself collectively call themselves "The Fighting Jews", and the school's band is called "The Marching Jews." The student newspaper is called "The Daily Jew." All the sports fans in town wear jackets and t-shirts with pictures of The Rabbi prominently displayed on them. And most cars have Rabbi stickers planted all over them. Three years ago, the University's Board of Trustees ran out of town on a rail a courageous and principled Chancellor who had the temerity to publicly suggest that the time had now come to "retire" the Rabbi. So of course there was a heated campaign on among the students and alumni to "Save the Rabbi!"

This German state university plays its soccer matches over at the Nuremberg Stadium in front of an audience of about 75,000 White Aryans, almost all of whom are wearing pro-Rabbi images and clothes. At half-time, the Marching Jews take to the stadium floor and begin playing what they purport to be Jewish sounding music along the lines of Fiddler-on-the-Roof. Then all 75,000 White Aryans rise as one and shout in unison: "Rabbi, Rabbi, Rabbi, Rabbi" gesticulating wildly and working themselves up into a feeding frenzy. One lone faculty member sits there in protest shouting "Racist Rabbi!" and everyone in the vicinity proceeds to throw garbage at him.

Finally, the moment these ardent White Aryans have all waited for has arrived. The Rabbi runs out onto the arena floor from among the Marching Jews, proceeds to the center of the Nuremberg Stadium, and dances the Hava Nagila while the Marching Jews play on and march into an intricately choreographed maneuver that they all brag about and take special pride in, and that culminates with the band being organized into a swastika. So the Rabbi continues to dance the Hava Nagila while the Marching Jews form themselves into a swastika. By now, all 75,000 White Aryans are hysterical, shouting, screaming and yelling: "Rabbi, Rabbi, Rabbi." This semi-religious spectacle that the Nazis are well known for staging, especially at the Nuremberg stadium, goes on for a good twenty minutes. It all concludes with everyone joining hands to sing "Deutschland, Deutschland Uber Alles," with the Rabbi leading all 75,000 White Aryans in the song. Then the Rabbi proceeds to dance the Hava Nagila out of the stadium followed by the Marching Jews. Everyone goes wild, clapping and cheering. This Rabbi ceremony brings tears to the eyes of many drunken alumni and students who had started several hours beforehand getting inebriated on schnapps and good German beer at pre-game tailgate parties.

When it is all over, a visiting law professor from another country asks his host at the soccer match what this spectacle was all about. Without missing a beat, the former Dean Mengeler of the Law School turns to his guest and says: "We are honoring the Jews" ... whom the Nazis had just exterminated 60 years ago, so of course the memory of the Jews needs to be honored by this spectacle. The Illiniwek Indians were ethnically cleansed out of Illinois about a century before that. These are the real "Little Eichmans." Be sure to "boo!" and root against the Illiniwaks.

Historically, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, its Boards of Trustees, its Presidents, its Chancellors, its Provosts, its Deans, Directors and Department Heads, and most of its Faculty and Alumni/ae have always been the Ku Klux Klan dressed up in Caps and Gowns instead of Hoods and Sheets.

LAND OF THE CHIEF/ HOME OF MODERN BLACKFACE MINSTRELSY:
SAMSON RAPHAELSON’S STORIES AND OURS
by Professor David Roediger

U of I grad Samson Raphaelson is enjoying a nice little comeback lately, a quarter of a century after his death. Members of the marching band might recognize the name. A song that he coauthored in the 1920s has recently turned up and undergone a revival with, as the university's Website reports, the band featuring it this season after points-after-touchdowns. You have heard "Fight Illini: The Stadium Song" if you go to games. Playing it is appropriate enough. After graduating during World War One, Raphaelson stayed on to play a leading role in the fund-raising for Memorial Stadium, write the first account of the stadium's story, and orbit around the marching band as the figure of Chief Illiniwek took shape in the 20s to the strains of songs like "Fight Illini."

Beyond the corn fields none of those accomplishments account for the extent to which Raphaelson's name has recently resurfaced. He is discussed instead in connection with his role in bringing into being the foundational talking film, The Jazz Singer. The film, which also is the critical link between blackface minstrelsy and modern U.S. culture, turned eighty this year. It was recently the subject of a lavish retrospective at the American Cinematheque in Beverly Hills.

The story of the Raphaelson as the U of I football fan and that of Raphaelson as the sophisticated writer responsible for the play on which The Jazz Singer was based are in fact the same story. This reality greatly complicates the ways in which the university ought to think about its own racial past, about its students' present flirtations with blackface as well as with other racial impersonations, and about its inability to let go of Chief Illiniwek.

At about the same time that Raphaelson wrote Days of Atonement, which would become The Jazz Singer, a lynching occurred on the edge of the University of Missouri campus. The great African American writer W.E.B. Du Bois wrote that Missouri could claim the dubious honor of being the first university to offer a course in racist atrocity. University of Illinois could similarly cast itself as the academic home of modern blackface minstrelsy.

The story is sadly fascinating. In 1917, Raphaelson saw a performance of the imperialist classic Robinson Crusoe in Champaign-Urbana. Al Jolson, the eventual star of The Jazz Singer, headlined in multiple roles, one of them—think about this—in blackface as the "native" character Friday in the Crusoe story. Raphaelson fell in love:

I shall never forget the first five minutes of Jolson -- his velocity, the amazing fluidity with which he shifted from tremendous absorption in his audience to a tremendous absorption in his song ... when he finished I turned to the girl beside me, dazed with memories of my childhood on the East Side ... my God, this isn't a jazz singer, this is a cantor!

The horrors and history of white performance in blackface here fully gave way before an opportunity to use racial disguise as if it had nothing to do with antiblack racism. On this view blackface could even be said to pay respects to jazz and to combat racism in the form of anti-Jewish sentiments.

The result was Days of Atonement, published in Everybody's Magazine in 1922, at about the same moment that Raphaelson wrote "Fight Illini." Dramatizing something of Jolson's own life, the play followed the Americanization-through-music of a young entertainer and the ways in which his Jewish roots both were transcended and survived. Jolson and George Jessel, then the bigger star of the two, both pitched production of the play on stage and as a film hard.

Approached early on was D.W. Griffith, who rejected making a movie of the play as too "racial." Presumably this meant too Jewish as Griffith's vicious use of blackface performance in the service of antiblack racism in Birth of a Nation, had already linked the minstrel tradition and U.S. silent film, as The Jazz Singer was to do for "talkies." When the film finally appeared in 1927, the victimization of African Americans by blackface was so off the studio’s radar that it was touted as being made "for the sake of racial tolerance" because it allegedly critiqued anti-Semitism.

We should keep Samson Raphaelson in mind as we think about the persistent confusion and racism of young white partygoers on campus and the reappearance of Chief Illiniwek at this year's University homecoming parade as two sides of a weighty coin. Those blackfaced partygoers are routinely criticized as representing a departure from the traditions of a liberal and inclusive university. They ought to be criticized. But so should the traditions, which are in truth anything but inclusive or antiracist. At their liberal best, such traditions reproduced and recreated white supremacy.

Samson Raphaelson was very far from conforming to the academic and Hollywood stereotype that has conservatives, blue collar workers and hicks doing all of the heavy lifting required for building and rebuilding white racism. Jewish and urbane, he lived as an undergraduate with the great founder of the Catholic Worker movement Dorothy Day. After Illinois, he joined forces with the director Ernest Lubitsh in Hollywood, writing such witty and marvelous films as Heaven Can Wait and Trouble in Paradise.
During the post-World War 2 Red Scare in Hollywood, his politics earned him the enmity of Red Channels, the anti-Communist scandal sheet that insisted he should be blacklisted as a radical. When he returned briefly as a celebrity to teach writing at Illinois his star students included that embodiment of U.S.-style cosmopolitanism, Playboy founder Hugh Hefner. Just before Raphaelson died, the left-liberal journalist Bill Moyers filmed a warm tribute to him.

Nor, for sheer ugliness of racism, was The Jazz Singer anything like Birth of a Nation. Indeed when the late Michael Rogin dissected the special dangers presented by the modernist blackface of The Jazz Singer, precisely because it combined a white supremacist form of racial disguise with liberal and pro-religious tolerance subtexts, his Blackface, White Noise generated a host of tortured defenses of the film: but Jolson admired jazz; but the impersonation expressed solidarity with Blacks; but, lighten up.
As complicated as the whole story is and must be, Rogin was right and his critics wrong. Similarly the important historian of nineteenth-century blackface, Alexander Saxton, was right to insist that the very form of the act undermined any potential for it to carry progressive messages within a white supremacist social order. Indeed the very claim to control race and to decide if blackface, and Indian-face, are well-meaning, admiring, or somehow not about race is itself an act of white privilege. When the contemporary students who party in blackface or around anti-Mexican stereotypes offer the same justifications for their behavior they act up within a tradition.

It pains me coming from really southern Illinois to sometimes hear people in the university imagine that small-town people there are a reason that the university cannot do the right thing and acknowledge Chief Illiniwek as a lengthy and racist mistake. Mostly, none of us down there cared about the Chief (Salukis, maybe) as I grew up and do not care now. The Chief was made, endlessly marketed and scandalously held onto for fifteen years after intense protest by Indians by cosmopolitan, often liberal, university-connected people, most powerfully by trustees and administrators.

Those same forces are now unable to acknowledge that the Chief was their, and their university’s, mistake. They resort to all sorts of fancy footwork around whether the eighty years of selling it—not "him," as a symbol of whiteness the Chief requires an impersonal pronoun—was a mistake at all, or just a phase we all needed to go through. Perhaps our reflecting on the uncomfortably close local histories of modern blackface minstrelsy and of Chief Illiniwek will lead students, if not administrators and trustees, to a little more clarity on these issues.

"As administrators planned this year's Homecoming parade, they created a policy that they interpreted was in keeping with the retirement directive. In reviewing that policy, Chancellor Richard Herman has determined that the interpretation was overly broad.

The University values free speech and free expression and considers Homecoming floats, decorations, costumes and related signage all representations of such personal expression."

My understanding, confirmed by staff, is that the revised policy will now permit Homecoming float makers to utilize the "Chief Illiniwek" logo or images, in the name of "free expression." This is an unfortunate decision on the part of the administration. The implications of this decision are significant, in ways that the administration fails to understand.

For example, taking this line of thinking further, if a float maker wants to use KKK imagery or a noose hanging from a tree on a homecoming float, is this now also acceptable under the auspices of "free expression?" Or if a float maker wants to use images of people copulating or nude participants on a float, would this also be accepted as the freedom of personal expression? And if not, why not? Certainly if public nudity is considered immoral or at least inappropriate, why not public racism?

Moreover, there is a blatant disregard here for the fact that "The Chief" is the direct product of racism, with its long history of appropriation and commodification of Native Americans---the same populations that were almost completely exterminated by white conquerors. Hence, the "Chief" image is no more an innocent cartoon figure, than would be a Klansman (or noose) image.

As such, the administration's lack of courage to hold firm on the policy of the "no Chief logo or imagery" represents another assault to Native Americans and all people of color who have suffered and continue to suffer humiliation, disregard, and exploitation, at the hands of those with decision-making power in this institution.

The lack of backbone shown by the administration on this issue and the lack of consistent administrative commitment to counter the further racialization of Native Americans on this university campus is truly disappointing and disheartening.

Please understand that it is not that we fail to recognize that this is a tough issue for administration; but it will never compare with the humiliation, frustration, and exploitation that so many students, faculty, staff, and administrators of color must contend with on a daily basis, as a consequence of racism, power, and privilege on this campus and in the surrounding community.

Hence, this administrative decision is a betrayal to all those who have struggled tirelessly for decades to change this policy. So Chancellor, for how long will we need to be subjected to such immorality and disgrace? How long more will we be treated like step-children of the powerful overseers of this institution?

How can we believe that we have a place in this so-called Inclusive Illinois, when we can't even depend on the administration to act with dignity and respect, on such an important issue?

Historically, public institutional expressions of racism in this society have only changed when people had the courage, dignity, and love to stand against such immorality. With so many colleges and universities across this country showing real commitment and wherewithal in stopping the use of "Indian" mascots, why not UIUC? How can such a prestigious university allow itself to behave so backward, in the face of so much suffering?

We understand that many people feel attached to the tradition of "chief illiniwek," but we live in a different era than when the 'chief' was initiated.

The practice of racial masquerade now belongs to the past. To continue racial masquerade is to perpetuate misinformation and a stereotype of Indian people. Racial stereotypes go against the goals of a great university by miseducating the university community. Stereotypes often feel hurtful to the people whose culture they misrepresent.

American Indian peoples have spoken out for many years about the harmful effects of the University of Illinois’s mascot. The Native American House and American Indian Studies Program are pleased that future generations will not be subjected to the caricature and to the performance of 'chief illiniwek,' which we see as a caricature and misrepresentation of actual Indian people.

We hope that students and community members who wish to honor and remember indigenous peoples will do so by learning about actual Indian people, not fantasies of what uninformed non-Indians suppose that Indians are like. One way to learn about actual Indian people would be to attend NAH events and to enroll in AIS courses.

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