A Southern California high school has decided to retire its controversial mascot honoring Arabs after it prompted objections from an anti-discrimination group last year, the Daily Caller reported. The old mascot will be replaced by a stoic, neatly groomed man, school officials said.
Coachella Valley High, which is located in the Southern California desert about 25 miles from Palm Springs, will no longer feature its Arab mascot, which appears as a sneering man with a scraggly beard, hooked nose and a headscarf, during football's halftime shows alongside a female genie who belly-danced, the Desert Sun reported.
The controversy began last November when a community member of the high school brought the mascot to the attention of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, NBC News reported.
After gathering opinions from the Arab-American community, many criticized the mascot as "orientalist stereotyping" that is offensive to all Arabs, said Abed A. Ayoub, the group's director of legal and policy affairs.
"By allowing continued use of the term and imagery, you are commending and enforcing the negative stereotypes of an entire ethnic group, millions of whom are citizens of this nation," wrote Ayoub last year.
However, the mascot criticism was deemed "political correctness run amok" by current students and alumni at Coachella High, who strongly resisted any change and claimed that the mascot had originally been chosen because the local area, like the Middle East, is famous for the production of dates, the Daily Caller reported.
But the Coachella Valley Unified School District eventually reached a compromise, announcing that although the high school teams would still be the "Arabs," the mascot design would undergo a radical redesign, which would need approval from the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee.
In the meantime, a group of students, alumni and school officials submitted five options in the spring. The one approved by the Arab civil rights group has a fat, round nose and a far less impressive beard-and-mustache combo.
"We passed it around to experts and community members," Ayoub told the Sun. "We took our time to get the opinion of that logo, and it was overwhelmingly positive."
A final resolution is expected to be announced publicly in the near future.
