Current Events > is the chicago blackhawks logo offensive?

(+) Yeah! (+)

team was named after a world war 1 regiment which in itself was named after chief blackhawk.
unlike chief wahoo, i don't find this logo a racist caricature

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Winding back through time, the current image is a modernization of the original image drawn in 1926 by Irene Castle (wife of team founder, Frederic McLaughlin).



The profile of that image looks strikingly similar to the profile of the Eternal Indian statue in Rock River, Illinois, sculpted by Loredo Taft and dedicated in 1911.



Taft said this statue didn't reperesent any one person or group, but it was identified as "Black Hawk" on the dedication program cover... which has been known as ever since.

[ A sketch of Black Hawk: the Sauk war chief, but not tribal chief of his people, made after his capture, shows that he looked much different than the person depicted by the team logo. ]



The "Black Hawk" Sauk war chief statue in Lake View, Iowa, sculpted by Harry Stinson, was dedicated in 1934 (left image). It was restored by Mada Jensen in 1999 (right image).


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All of this being said, 1) such depictions were made to honor, not trivialize, Black Hawk's fighting spirit (though, imo, I'm not the right person to be saying whether or not it's offensive), and 2) these seem like perilous times for personalized icons, regardless of the person(s) being given the tribute or the underlying intent for their making.

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In Portland we have our Winterhawks, and we recently changed our logo -

https://i.imgur.com/uzL5MIM.png

We didn't replace it full time, but it's a step in the right direction, imo. You can see our main logo in that picture as well, it looks a lot like the Blackhawk one

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Not to me.

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