How Madden Forced Me to Confront My Inherent Racial Bias

CW for discussion of racist tropes and images

Ask anyone that’s known me since I bombarded my father with an unyielding sales pitch on the virtues of buying me a Sega Genesis with NFL Football ‘94 Starring Joe Montana packed in and they’ll tell you there are two cultural throughlines that molded me: sports and video games.

The two have always gone hand-in-hand dating back to my earliest memories. Sitting on my grandma’s lap, fully engrossed in her knowledge of warp pipes in Super Mario Bros., led to a frantic Christmas morning where I first clutched my NES. My parents bought two games to go along with the gift: Outrun and Bases Loaded 3.

I was falling in love with sports at the same time thanks to a (platonic) love affair with San Francisco 49ers quarterback Steve Young, and Atlanta Braves fever hitting my south Georgia town despite them losing two World Series in a row. Needless to say, I was a rather tepid Braves fan (Expos all day!), but my parents still took me to games and I began ingesting news, stats and rosters from all teams of all leagues until I became that one early-30s dude what annoys you by talking about how rad cricket is “if you’d only take the five hours to watch a match.”

I promise I’m not that insufferable.

Regardless, the two consumed my free time, whether on an actual or virtual field. Don’t get me wrong, I explored other game genres and found hobbies outside of being a mediocre football player. But there was a reason why my mom kept bragging to people at church that I was going to work for ESPN or the NFL when I grew up. I was obsessed.

So much so that I began crafting my own leagues within my favorite games. I still have notebooks full of old tournaments and leagues built for nearly every AKI Nintendo 64 wrestling game and Madden NFL titles post-2003. But the two game-based custom leagues I’ve maintained the longest exist within WWE Smackdown Vs. Raw 2006 and Madden NFL 07.

What I didn’t expect was that this world I built for myself would end up making me face my own inherent bias toward the representation of First Nations communities within sports as a whole. 

You see, my favorite part of the process is creating teams. Coming up with names, matching the perfect colors together and implementing them in both uniforms and logos remains super satisfying twenty years on. But there was one team out of the 32 I created for my Madden 07 league that gave me a distinct sense of pride. That team was the Dakota Tribe, a team cast in orange and blue whose logo featured an American Indian in a flowing headdress.

I didn’t know why I looked on the Tribe with such fervor or why I even thought I needed to include a team with a facsimile of a marginalized population in my completely made up league that featured such teams as the Cape Town Gabriels, Portland Regals and Toronto Maple Maximo. That is until I looked around at the culture of co-opting First Nations communities within sports in which I grew up.

If there is one thing in the sporting world I hated growing up in south Georgia it was the “Tomahawk Chop” utilized by the Atlanta Braves and Florida State Seminoles. The chant was inescapable during my youth as the legends of Bobby Cox and Bobby Bowden (lot of Bobby’s in southern sports) grew as the teams they led reached new heights. The Braves won 15 consecutive division titles and a World Series. The Seminoles won national championships in football. And I couldn’t stand either of them.

But that hate didn’t spawn from the cultural appropriation the chant represents. Nor that it hinted back to an even worse time where the Braves employed the offensive mascot Chief Noc-a-homa. The Seminoles still employed (and still does now) a mascot, or a “symbol” as FSU prefers, named Osceola, regularly portrayed by an FSU student, that rode out on horseback to implant a spear at midfield ahead of home football games. FSU and fans of its sports teams constantly refer to the university’s relationship with the Seminole tribe, which houses both supporters and critics of the university’s use of traditional Seminole imagery, as protests consistently popped up over the last 30-plus years. Those reasons would be plenty of ammunition to back my Grinch-esque reaction to the chant.

Instead, I, who still had my Washington racist slur helmet painted to look like a 49ers helmet displayed in my childhood bedroom, hated the chant because it was annoying.

First Nations sports mascots were normal to me. That began to change as I got older and grew to realize the issues these stereotypical depictions presented. I joined the fight, lending my voice to those fights as an ally.Yet I still put a team in a league I made from scratch that reflected the same sentiment held by the NFL, MLB, NHL and NCAA that I fought against.

The Dakota Tribe played mostly middling football in my league for 90 seasons over a twelve year period, including two championship victories, before my partner stumbled upon my pastime while the Tribe faced their conference rival, the Juneau Freeze. The first thing they noticed was the Tribe’s logo and pointed out its racially insensitive nature. I can’t think of another moment in my life where I wanted to take my skin off like a suit in response to the internal cringe of what I had perpetuated within my creation. That was the final game for the Dakota Tribe.

The realization forced me to reflect on the racially insensitive attitudes I grew up around and question my self-defined allyship in the fight against such dehumanizing imagery. We are all a product of our environments to an extent, but increased globalization has made it easier than ever to educate ourselves beyond our hometown cultural norms.

I took advantage of those resources to educate myself about the history of racist imagery in professional sports, spinning that research into papers and presentations. I used my time as a sports talk radio host at my college radio station to criticize organizations like the Braves, Kansas City Chiefs, Cleveland Indians, and the Washington NFL team for their depictions of First Nations.

What I neglected to see was that the fervor of railing against logos and cultural appropriation caused me to overlook the thought processes that allowed these issues to become systemic. I thought it was enough to call for the end of the Tomahawk chant and the renaming of a football team. In reality, that only attacked the issue at a surface level.

That period of reflection brought me back to the question of why I took so much pride in my creation, and I found the conclusion personally horrifying. I saw the Tribe as a symbol honoring the legacy of First Nations people as powerful warriors with a long history of perseverance and strength in the face of physical, cultural and political foes. It’s the same defense offered by Daniel Snyder, current owner of Washington, D.C.’s NFL team, and NFL commissioner Roger Goodell to justify not changing the team’s racist name and logo. A defense with no standing after a forgotten quote in the Associated Press debunked the story that the team’s founder, George Preston Marshall, gave the team it’s controversial name in honor of then-head coach William Dietz’s Sioux heritage, which was also exposed as a lie.

I had internalized their lie even though I knew what it was. And my 30-plus years submerged in the world of sports caused it to seep into my other love. I’m thankful that my partner discovered my custom Madden league despite my own concerns that they’d think I was beyond dorky. It saved me from a path of subconscious denial. It made me realize that I still had work to do within myself.

The Dakota Tribe will never take the field in my copy of Madden 07 again, but what they represent won’t leave my mind, for, if they do, I lose the lessons learned from my mistake.

Complacency is a four-letter word when it comes to cultural and racial progression. I thought I was a great ally while I cheered on my orange and blue crew in my bedroom. It can be painful, but we all, especially if we self-identify as allies for marginalized groups, must continually reassess our own inherent biases and better understand what informs them in order to be effective in those roles. Throwing your weight behind a cultural fight for change only works if you’re willing to be confronted with the most disappointing aspects of yourself and put in the work to make them, just like the Dakota Tribe, a thing of the past.