March 2010 April 2010 May 2010 June 2010 July 2010
August 2010
September 2010 October 2010
November 2010
December 2010
January 2011
February 2011 March 2011 April 2011 May 2011 June 2011 July 2011 August 2011 September 2011 October 2011 November 2011 December 2011 January 2012 February 2012 March 2012 April 2012 May 2012 June 2012 July 2012 August 2012 September 2012 October 2012 November 2012 December 2012 January 2013 February 2013 March 2013 April 2013 May 2013 June 2013 July 2013 August 2013 September 2013 October 2013 November 2013 December 2013 January 2014 February 2014 March 2014 April 2014 May 2014 June 2014 July 2014 August 2014 September 2014 October 2014 November 2014 December 2014 January 2015 February 2015 March 2015 April 2015 May 2015 June 2015 July 2015 August 2015 September 2015 October 2015 November 2015 December 2015 January 2016 February 2016 March 2016 April 2016 May 2016 June 2016 July 2016 August 2016 September 2016 October 2016 November 2016 December 2016 January 2017 February 2017 March 2017 April 2017 May 2017 June 2017 July 2017 August 2017 September 2017 October 2017 November 2017 December 2017 January 2018 February 2018 March 2018 April 2018 May 2018 June 2018 July 2018 August 2018 September 2018 October 2018 November 2018 December 2018 January 2019 February 2019 March 2019 April 2019 May 2019 June 2019 July 2019 August 2019 September 2019 October 2019 November 2019 December 2019 January 2020 February 2020 March 2020 April 2020 May 2020 June 2020 July 2020 August 2020 September 2020 October 2020 November 2020 December 2020 January 2021 February 2021 March 2021 April 2021 May 2021 June 2021 July 2021 August 2021 September 2021 October 2021 November 2021 December 2021 January 2022 February 2022 March 2022 April 2022 May 2022 June 2022 July 2022 August 2022 September 2022 October 2022 November 2022 December 2022 January 2023 February 2023 March 2023 April 2023 May 2023 June 2023 July 2023 August 2023 September 2023 October 2023 November 2023 December 2023 January 2024 February 2024 March 2024
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29
30
31
News Every Day |

Changing the Chiefs: How an online campaign got a rugby team to ditch their racist branding

Dave Ewers scores during the Aviva Premiership Ruby game

Southwest England is full of pastoral beauty – low, rolling hills, mesmerizing coastlines, and cliffs that rival the famed cliffs of Dover. Nestled in amongst these green valleys are countless little villages, each one with its own proud history stretching back thousands of years. 

On cool autumn afternoons on the weekend, it wouldn’t be uncommon to see a drove of people in this part of the world filing into the pub to watch the Exeter Chiefs game. 

And while you might expect the fans to be wearing a few Exeter shirts or the iconic white and red rose English jersey, you probably don’t expect a white man in a traditional Cherokee headdress. Or his children, chasing each other with inflatable tomahawks.

Yet, that seemingly incongruous image is one that's been part and parcel of Chiefs support — and why some determined a change was needed, going online to bring England into an ongoing debate that some American franchises have grappled with in recent years.

Change agents

The Exeter Chiefs have come under fire in recent years, though not for their results. 

Indeed, their teams are some of the most successful in England with their men’s team winning the Gallagher Premiership twice and crowned European champions in 2020, while their women’s team was league runners-up in 2022. 

However, the Chiefs achieved all this success with overtly harmful and disingenuous branding featuring Native American imagery.

"It wasn’t just the logo that was the problem," says Elizabeth Holloway, a lifelong Chiefs fan. "It was everything about their branding. Their store was the 'Trading Post,' they had bars called 'the Wigwam,' and this cartoonish mascot called 'Big Chief.'"

Holloway and a few like-minded Chiefs fans wanted, in her words, "to be as proud of our team off the field as we were on it." That feeling led to the launch of Exeter Chiefs for Change in 2020 — an online grassroots organization dedicated to eliminating Exeter’s racist branding and logo. 

In just under two years, they were successful — at least in part. 

In January 2022, the Exeter Chiefs announced that they were dropping Native American imagery in favor of Celtic Dumnonii imagery – a brand celebrating Devon’s local history. 

https://twitter.com/ExChiefs4Change/status/1486701061016596493

This change wouldn’t have happened without the pressure online communities put on the club. 

The roots of the Chiefs

The Exeter Rugby Club has played in Devon for over 150 years, making them one of England’s oldest teams. Storied though their history might be, it was not until rugby’s professional era in the late 1990s that the Chiefs were first christened. 

According to Robert Kitson’s book, Exe Men, team owner Tony Rowe was at a loss as to what to call his team in the new era of professionalism until he was tipped off to an old Devon tradition of calling your starting 15 players the 'chiefs.' With a name in place, they commissioned an artist to create a logo, and the Exeter Chiefs were born.

After ascending to the Gallagher Premiership for the first time in 2010, people started taking notice of the team’s imagery and realized that it was problematic and perpetuating harmful ethnic stereotypes. 

Rowe himself was at their first championship in 2017, appearing during post-match celebrations in Native American regalia, recalls Lee Calvert, co-host of the popular podcast Blood & Mud Rugby

"That was actually one of the first Premiership games that was broadcast to the United States," says Calvert. "It was a bit shocking, to be honest, to see him and a few others come out with headdresses on."

"When I try to explain it to people here in the UK," he says, "I tell them wearing a headdress is like wearing a British army uniform with medals that you never earned. People here are incensed by that, so why would they just accept it when Chiefs fans wear headdresses?"

Increasing online pressure

"When we started off, we never had a problem with the name 'Chiefs,'" Holloway explains of Exeter Chiefs for Change’s mission. "This is a part of the country with a rich history of Celtic tribes and there was also a push to increase tourism to the area. We thought that a team that highlighted Devon’s identity would be a natural fit."

But the Chiefs’ board of directors initially bristled at the notion of change.

"There was a board meeting," Holloway recalls, "where we sent an information pack. We had research on the harm that imagery like this does, statements from Native American campaign groups, and even a local historian who had written about it a few years earlier.

"But at the board meeting, their only conclusion was that the mascot could be considered problematic, taking the ‘Not Your Mascot’ slogan literally and concluding that the rest of their branding was respectful."

So, the 'Big Chief' mascot was removed, but the Exeter Chiefs for Change still had work to do.  

They had grown a dedicated online Twitter following, created a petition gaining thousands of signatures, and were featured on several news sites and rugby podcasts, including Calvert’s Blood & Mud, helping to spread the word.

https://twitter.com/bloodandmud/status/677092541158850560

"We eventually approached the NCAI and brought this to their attention," says Holloway, referring to the National Congress of American Indians

"We knew that they had already run campaigns to change the branding of American sports teams," she recalls, including rebrands of both Major League Baseball's Cleveland Guardians (the Indians for much of their century-plus tenure) and the National Football League's Washington Commanders (even more problematically, dating back to the 1930s all the way to 2020, the Redskins). 

“They wrote an open letter requesting the Exeter Chiefs change their branding to something that was not harmful to Native Americans and sent it to them before the next board meeting.”

https://twitter.com/exchiefs4change/status/1458470306717347840

The letter from the NCAI, along with mounting pressure from social media backlash led the board of directors of the Exeter Chiefs to finally make a decision: the brand redesign would be implemented in July 2022.

Not without hiccups

The shift hasn’t been without its hiccups. While the old logo has been removed, the Tomahawk Chop, a chant that Exeter used in the past, has still been played through the stadium’s PA system despite promises that it was retired. 

The chant, created in the 1980s by the Florida State Seminoles, has an accompanying ‘chopping’ motion and is used as a hype-up song, encouraging the team to 'scalp' their enemies, invoking harmful stereotypes of the Native American 'savage.'

https://twitter.com/ExChiefs4Change/status/1327557234419765248

Lydia Berman, branding expert and founder of Creative Stripes, a UK-based marketing agency, understands that the Chiefs rebrand can’t be a once-off event and will require the club to make a constant effort. 

"Attempting to undo decades of racist caricature imagery will not be changed overnight with a new logo," Berman says. 

"Fans need to feel engaged with the change. That takes time to filter through. With sports in particular, fans carry their attachment to colours, phrases, and styling as much as their passion towards the sport overall."

This rings true, particularly with the Tomahawk Chop still leading the teams onto the field.

While the Exeter Chiefs have been reached out to since the rebrand to address these concerns, each message is met with “no one from the club will be making any further comment” on the rebrand, from media and communications officer Mark Stevens. 

The future of rugby

While many have seen this as a positive step for more empathy and understanding in rugby, many fans, unsurprisingly, have seen it as liberalism run amok. 

"The general pushback that we got from some listeners," Lee Calvert says, "was that this was just 'wokery,' and that we should be finding something else to be concerned about."

https://twitter.com/harry_balzack/status/1464286726633967629

The Exeter Chiefs branding controversy is a microcosm of a larger issue in rugby, an extension of the belief that 'rugby values' make it better than other sports. 

Rugby union in the UK has had some particularly bad press recently, with Scottish fullback Rufus McLean pleading guilty to domestic abuse this past December, and the Welsh Rugby Union’s corporate culture of sexism and racism exposed by the BBC in a Jan. 23 report.

"There’s this belief that everyone who plays rugby is a 'top bloke' or a 'good rugby man' and that somehow, if a person is linked with rugby, they can do no wrong," Calvert says. The same is often said of rugby teams.

The Chiefs, however, have set an example by doing the right thing – though it will be impossible to know whether it was done with genuine concern or purely for optics.

In the end, Holloway is still showing up for Chiefs games at small pubs in Devon when visiting home. There, she’ll get the occasional snarky comment, along the lines of 'look what you’ve done,' as the team sprints out wearing new logos across their chests. 

There may be fewer headdresses, but the Tomahawk Chop is still pumped through the PA system, and flags featuring old, harmful imagery are still flown with pride. 

Holloway knows that the fanbase is not going to change overnight, and Exeter Chiefs for Change’s mission has now altered somewhat. Instead of changing the Chiefs’ branding, their goal is now perhaps more difficult: To change the hearts and minds of holdout fans. 

Chris Jaworski is a freelance rugby writer based in Johannesburg. After moving from Canada to South Africa in 2015, Chris learned his rucks from his mauls (after years of playing gridiron football) and a new love was born. He supports the Lions, the Springboks, and the Canadian National Team (old habits). He can be found most weekends on Twitter (@TheRugbyCat) ranting about rugby.

Sign up to receive the Daily Dot’s Internet Insider newsletter for urgent news from the frontline of online.

The post Changing the Chiefs: How an online campaign got a rugby team to ditch their racist branding appeared first on The Daily Dot.

Москва

Татьяна Марчук выпустила альбом «Экопесенки» на лейбле Riki Music

I was diagnosed with cancer aged 39… you are never too rich, too famous or too young, says Dr Philippa Kaye

The 10 Intense New Action Movies on Netflix That Left Me on the Edge of My Seat!

Top 10 Emmanuelle Seigner Movies

Top 10 Love Affair Movies of the 2000s and 2010s

Ria.city






Read also

Andie Swim review 2024: Our favorite pieces and why we love the brand

Microsoft cautions developers to avoid curvy female characters

The Best and Worst Tampa Bay Rays All-Time against the Toronto Blue Jays

News, articles, comments, with a minute-by-minute update, now on Today24.pro

News Every Day

Top 5 Websites to Watch FREE Movies - TV Shows (No Sign up!)

Today24.pro — latest news 24/7. You can add your news instantly now — here


News Every Day

The 10 Intense New Action Movies on Netflix That Left Me on the Edge of My Seat!



Sports today


Новости тенниса
WTA

Александрова обыграла первую ракетку мира на турнире WTA



Спорт в России и мире
Москва

Блиц-матч по шахматам между двумя командами провели в павильоне «Спорт для каждого»



All sports news today





Sports in Russia today

Москва

GeekVape в сотрудничестве с Absolute Racing выиграла чемпионат в категории GT3


Новости России

Game News

Cyberpunk 2077 станет временно бесплатной для PlayStation и Xbox


Russian.city


Москва

Вопрос социальной газификации обсудили на встрече с жителями деревни Жостово


Губернаторы России
Сергей Собянин

Удалось спасти: Москва не потеряла в больницах ни одного человека после теракта, сообщил Собянин


Пассажир рейса Москва — Пермь попал в реанимацию

Бизнесвумен Оксана Самойлова опубликовала фото своей гардеробной

Metaratings: "Спартак" может уволить Абаскаля по ходу сезона, клуб ищет тренера

Пользователи соцсетей обсуждают теорию о силовиках на концерте в "Крокусе"


Певец Александр Ревва попросил не трогать его семью после слухов об эмиграции

Аранжировка Песен. Аранжировка Музыки. Создание Аранжировок.

Алла Пугачева готовится к 75-летию дать большой концерт

«В России будет то, чего не было, и не будет того, что было»: Земфира, Noize MC, Парфенов и другие звезды записали рэп-молитву в память о Навальном


Россиянка покинула WTA-1000 из-за проблем со здоровьем

Россиянка Александрова обыграла первую ракетку мира Свентек

Рыбакина о том, что не играла в Индиан-Уэллс из-за болезни: «К сожалению, восстановление заняло много времени»

Янник Синнер поделился впечатлениями от общения с игроками сборной Италии по футболу



«Радио Зенит» – информационный партнер форума «Мы вместе. Спорт»

Заказать недорогой ремонт кухонной мебели в районе в Москве и Московской области

Рынок вторичной недвижимости Крыма: цены растут, а спрос?

Шапки женские вязаные на Wildberries, 2024 — новый цвет от 392 руб. (модель 466)


АИРР на Стартап-туре 2024

США включили ряд российских блокчейн-платформ в список SDN

Бизнес в огне. Почему так часто горят склады

Shot: рейс Turkish Airlines вернулся во Внуково из-за криков и танцев пассажира


В Турции снимут ремейк «Холопа» со звездой сериала «Постучись в мою дверь»

Специалист Чегодаева прокомментировала популярность студий на рынке жилья

Фракция КПРФ в Мособлдуме за дополнительные меры поддержки для детей, потерявших родителей в результате теракта в «Крокус Сити Холле»

Турист из Красноярска впал в кому на борту самолета в аэропорту Бангкока



Путин в России и мире






Персональные новости Russian.city
Сергей Шнуров

Музыкант Устьянцев: Сергей Шнуров — профессионал, а Жуков — «балалаечка»



News Every Day

Top 10 Love Affair Movies of the 2000s and 2010s




Friends of Today24

Музыкальные новости

Персональные новости