Get Rid Of 'Racist' Blackhawks Logo, Urges Chicago Rapper Vic Mensa

By Stephen Gossett in Arts & Entertainment on Sep 20, 2017 3:49PM

It wasn't the first time the Chicago Blackhawks logo has been called out for being offensive, and it surely won't be the last. Chicago-native rapper Vic Mensa renewed the call for the local NHL team to change its logo—a profile with face paint and feathers—which Mensa blasted as "racist."

"The @NHLBlackhawks need to replace this logo IMMEDIATELY. it's racist," he said on Twitter on Tuesday evening, sharing a photo of the logo.

"Imagine having your people massacred and turned into a mascot...," he added in a followup tweet.

When one user replied that the Blackhawks' logo was "one of the most iconic" in sports, Mensa countered, "that's y it hurts. but it gotta go."

The logo has found itself the center of debate before, notably in 2015, when Ojibway artist Mike Ivall's "culturally appropriate" version of the logo for a youth hockey team went viral. More recently, a seven-year-old girl from an Indigenous family in Calgary refused to wear a Blackhawks-esque logo, calling it "discriminatory," according to Yahoo!'s Puck Daddy blog. And Dom Luszczyszynm an NHL writer for The Athletic, last month left the Blackhawks' logo unranked in a ranking of the NHL's best. When asked by a fellow hockey writer if that meant the logo shouldn't exist, he replied, "That is correct."

The appropriation of Native American culture has of course long been an issue in the sports world, professional and collegiate. Some media outlets (understandably) refer to one NFL franchise as "the Washington football team," and the Cleveland Indians' caricature logo regularly attracts protests. Closer to home, the University of Illinois announced in August that it had gotten rid of its controversial "war chant."

Local hockey writer Satchel Price wrote of the controversy in 2015:

"The Blackhawks and the Wirtz family have done a good job of separating themselves from the controversy that's followed Dan Snyder's NFL franchise. They've worked hard with communities and have helped to fashion a dialogue around the team's logo that's more grey than black and white. Still, it's not hard to see why people might find Chicago's current primary NHL logo offensive, and that shouldn't be dismissed."