Whitesboro's racist town logo up for vote

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After seeing the original it looks more like dancing than fighting or wrestling, and a dance off would be one great way to found your town.

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Ah, so the seal has an environmental and ecological disaster, rather than a human disaster.

I still remember that there was something to do with an Indian chief tied to a tree with a cannon pointed at him though.

Here it is:

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According to the show this is part of the city hall’s mural program:

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I wonder who actually painted that, in real life. I wonder if they did it as a way to remember people, the human beings the white men (I include myself among them) brutally killed in creative ways to clear the prairie.

Christ what assholes we our great grandparents were. It’s only by our own efforts at morality that we don’t recapitulate our forefather’s mistakes and evil doings.

Even though it’s a completely fictional depiction, it still seems completely plausible, and that bugs me. It’s supposed to be absurd but reading about what the settlers did to the native americans this scene wouldn’t really be out of the ordinary.

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That could be Anywhereville, Planet Earth. It’s still gonna be a monstrously stupid logo. What an embarrasment.

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Pretty sure it was painted for the show, in keeping with the running undercurrent of dark humor about the general awfulness and stupidity of Pawnee’s citizens dating back to its establishment. See also: Springfield (and Shelbyville.)

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I believe that is called “the point”.

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It’s a town emblem. A logo. Its very purpose is to be able to communicate its meaning to the viewer without the need of additional context. If it doesn’t do that - if people need to “check out the facts” to see that the crude image of a white man throttling a native man is actually “just” a crude, poorly-conceived depiction of a slightly less racist episode from the history of displacement and genocide of the continent’s native people - then it’s a fucking failure as an emblem, whether or not one finds it offensive.

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Wait, wasn’t this an episode of Parks and Recreation?

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We don’t?

Screaming Child Covered in Her Dead Mother’s Blood, Iraq, 2005

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I don’t think this is particularly racist, if you know the history of the area. It’s in Oneida County of NY–land that was taken from the Iroquois Confederacy via dirty dealings after the Oneida supported the Americans in their Revolutionary war.

If anything, a white settler throttling a Native American is a good description of what happened there, and during further Westward Expansion. Though the Oneida historical society’s account of the match would make for a much lulzier seal

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I thought the same thing. Racist is not the correct designation, perhaps distasteful.

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Riiiiiiiight. Because stuff like this needs no explanation at all.

I can’t wait for summer, when I take the kids to see DC’s famous Burning Eye Pyramid.

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Wrong city.

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Maybe not the original intent, but if we’re considering putting Trups name on the money too, why not this?

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Now, there’s a logo I can understand.

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Reverse the positions of the white guy and the Native American and then tell us it’s just a friendly wrestling match.

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Shouldn’t that judgment be rendered by racism’s victims? I don’t mean to single you out on that, but it would be good to hear what any remaining indigenous people in that area think of it.

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It indeed needs no explanation. The existence of esoteric symbolism doesn’t mean that the image requires explanation to function as a logo. Those seals don’t clearly articulate an unintentional message/narrative with their imagery. Their abstraction (in the case of the masonic pyramid) and/or their use of relatively universal symbols (in the case of the eagles, stars, & arrows) make them function pretty well as icons. They’re clearly not intended to be illustrations of real-world events/places/objects.

The Whiteboro icon IS supposed to be a representation of a historic event, but it fails to do so. Because if people read it as a representation of that event, they likely misread it because it is poorly designed. OR if people read it as a symbolic image/icon, since that’s more commonly how such seals use imagery, it communicates pretty clearly an anti-native message.

Likewise, you don’t need to know who Andre the Giant is for Shepard Fairey’s OBEY GIANT icons to function.

(But what does it matter. I’m arguing with someone who has a fedora in their avatar icon. That never, ever, ever leads to a reasonable conversation…)