Tuesday, December 4, 2007

When going PC goes too far

The new Philadelphia Phillies Triple-A team, the Lehigh Valley IronPigs, will begin playing in 2008. Naturally, they need a mascot. So they decided on a big furry pig whose moniker would be PorkChop. Sounds delicious. Or so I thought.

It turns out that naming the mascot PorkChop wasn't appreciated by a few local Latinos who claimed that the name was offensive. Huh?

Yes, it turns out (at least according to Urban Dictionary) that pork chop is a racist term used to refer to people of Puerto Rican descent.

However, Dictionary.com also tells me that pork chop is "the flesh of hogs used as food."

I don't want to sound insensitive here, but this seems to be going a bit too far. This isn't flying the stars and bars over the state capital or somebody wearing blackface. It's naming a pig mascot after a popular cooked food.

What is interesting though is that the IronPigs immediately decided to change the name of the mascot to Ferrous - from the Latin word "ferrum," or iron. No Romans were angry about the name change as far as I know.

But more seriously, the IronPigs quick response is impressive, considering we have a number of teams out there, most notably the Redskins and Indians, who really should have had their names changed years ago - because their names are unambiguous terms directly used to demean a specific ethnicity. Plus Chief Wahoo is a ridiculous mascot.

How people can succeed so quickly in changing a benign name, but can't affect the same change with a truly offensive name, is a bit of an enigma.

-WCK

4 comments:

World of Isaac said...

We've gone too far in our society with the PC stuff....I never even knew that was an offensive term...

World of Isaac said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Anonymous said...

LOL. After being named the city with the ugliest people, maybe Porky isn't the right mascot. How bout getting some hot puerto rican cheerleaders? Or is that racist and sexist?

Anonymous said...

It's also offensive to Jews who keep Kosher.

Can't we all just get along?

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