The Braves have made the World Series for the first time since 1999, and suddenly the tomahawk chop is going to be a signature feature of it.
“Braves” might be hard enough to sell as inoffensive on its own, but it is indefensible when it’s a package deal with a sea of almost entirely non–Native American people pretending to let out Native American war cries at every home game.īut all of that is different now. Perhaps the league has reasoned that whatever controversy the chop stirs up never persists for long enough or loudly enough for it to actually reflect badly on the sport overall. They rarely stick around in the playoffs long enough for the tomahawk chop to linger and sustain national attention, and the powers that be at MLB have more or less left it alone. The Braves, for all their success in the 1990s, haven’t been in front of the national stage that often since then, and even when they have advanced in the postseason, the knock on them is that they tend to fade away rather quickly. But Major League Baseball has tolerated its existence anyway, if not because its leaders themselves endorse it then because the league doesn’t seem to think the controversy has risen to something that must be dealt with. The chop has always been a ridiculous and offensive practice and should have been retired eons ago out of basic decency. At minimum, no reaction has been sufficient enough to compel the team to change course. It has, thus far, not caused sponsors to pull their funding of the team, inspired widespread fan or broadcast boycotts, or brought on league sanctions. The chop has survived in the same way other racist caricatures have survived, which is by avoiding being deemed so controversial that it becomes necessary, in the eyes of its corporate overlords, for it to be squashed.
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