It will be business as usual this Saturday at Lisle when the host team meets Dwight in an Interstate Eight Conference football game.
At least that’s what officials of both schools are hoping. They are hoping people will put the alleged racial incidents that marred the teams’ game last Oct. 8 in Dwight in their rear-view mirrors and let the schools conduct this one in peace and relative quiet.
“It’s time to move on to a new day,” Dwight Principal Eric Flohr said.
Both he and Lisle Principal Ron Logeman seem concerned media attention could rekindle passions and hinder their attempts to restore a sense of normalcy to Lisle-Dwight football.
“It seems to be an issue we learned from and moved past,” Logeman said. “[Lisle is] not treating this year’s game any different than we treat any other game.”
Last season’s game was anything but routine. Lisle’s players, several of them African-American, accused their opponents of using racial slurs on the field, and Lisle coach Dan Sanko said someone carved “KKK” in his team’s locker room during the contest.
Dwight officials interviewed about 50 people, including players, coaches and game officials. Flohr said the interviews did not substantiate that the allegations were true or false, though he did say one player may have heard an epithet, but without knowing who used it.
Flohr also said the “KKK” had been in the locker room before the game but should have been removed.
Lisle and Dwight officials have worked since then to smooth their relations and said competition between the schools in other sports has been relatively normal. Neither Flohr nor Logeman would get specific about the steps they said they have taken to ensure that, and Sanko said he had been instructed to avoid commenting about the subject.
“It was a pretty painful week,” Flohr said. “Rehashing the past just makes things worse.”
Forgetting it can make things worse too. Remembering, in fact, can be useful, as long as we can do it without rancor.
That’s why it’s encouraging that the topic at the Interstate Eight’s annual leadership conference Thursday at Starved Rock State Park will be diversity. The event’s timing is coincidental, but the choice of topic is in part a response to last year’s Lisle-Dwight game.
According to Logeman, the theme Thursday will be respecting differences in others, something he believes his and Dwight’s students have learned to do better in the last year.
There is, however, always more to learn, which brings us to a subject one of the 80 students in attendance Thursday should bring up: the Sandwich Indians.
Sandwich, a member of the Interstate Eight, is among the approximately 70 Illinois high schools that still have Indian nicknames. Principal Gil Morrison said the nickname has never become an issue and that the school, which uses an Indian nickname and logo but not a mascot, avoids using any “cartoonish” images.
“We try just to recognize the nobility,” he said.
I believe it, just as I believe that officials and fans at schools with Indian nicknames do consider the use of those names to be an honor rather than an insult. But the essence of racial sensitivity is that what is perceived is often more important than what is intended.
If an Indian nickname is not intended as an insult but Native Americans take it as one–and many do–that makes it an insult. That in turn makes such nicknames something institutions of education should not be associated with.
Niles West seems to have gotten that message. The District 219 school board will decide Oct. 16 whether to drop the school’s “Indians” nickname. According to district public relations director Brian Nolan, Niles West dropped its use of an Indian mascot and limited use of the nickname itself in 1989 in response to complaints from representatives of Native Americans.
Last summer, after similar complaints, the school board decided to consider taking the logical next step by changing nicknames. A majority of board members appears to favor that move.
Good for them. They are showing it doesn’t take an incident as unfortunate and inflammatory as the one at Dwight to get schools to tackle issues of race and tolerance.
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Send e-mail to Barry Temkin at BarTem@aol.com
