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let's rewind a few years:

as a kid, i hated baseball.

it's a shitty sport. it's boring, slow, uninteresting, takes forever, lacks action, low scoring, too many games in a season — overall, shit.

if you would have told young-me that i *love* baseball now, and went on a two-hour walk just to listen to the world series on the radio from my phone, that would have seemed most implausible.

baseball is awesome, and so are the braves. good game, houston.

it seems one can't mention the braves without mentioning the conflict around their name and the 'tomahawk chop' their fans do.

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is the "braves" name or the tomahawk chop racist?

those questions are important, nuanced, and *arguable*.

i haven't read anything so far that makes me answer "yes" to the last question above, which to me is the most important one.

but either way, the origin and current usage of the braves name and tomahawk chop comes from a minority culture, and is worthy of being examined. i commend our evaluation of it as a culture, and i think that *can be* production.

so, i ask now as a latinx person, where is the evaluation of:

if there have been discussions about these things, they have been far and few between.

if you think that's an out-of-left-field (! a baseball pun!) argument, you might be right. but if we're guaging for cultural impact by number of people possibly effected, should be at the top of the minority priority list. we're 60.5 million people in this country. and growing.

since there seems to be little social profit to be gained from critiquing appropriation of latinx cultures, i haven't heard much.

that's not to say the examination of the braves name and the tomahawk chop is invalid. it *does* mean that examination is contrived, and the motivations for it, dubious.

...

let's return, then, to the initial question, which many people seem to refuse to discuss:

it is certainly *racial*, in that it involves race and intersecting cultures. that does not inherently make it harmful, damaging, and maliciously intended.

the answer to that question, i don't know, and i certainly can't know as well as a native american person, so i'll use my own proxy:

my relation to mexican (and more broadly, latinx culture), and it's representation in america:

that's only me speaking for me, though.

...

it's an interesting issue, this whole braves thing, and it's made me reflect on the ways my own culture is portrayed and used. i can't tell if my opinion on this has softened or hardened — maybe, it's just up in the air, and this is my way of gathering thoughts.

who knows. i am open to any conclusion.

in conclusion:

it was an awesome baseball game. go braves.