Dishonorable Mention: Why the fight against Native American Mascoting

Speaker: Kevin Blackistone

DC-native Kevin Blackistone is a longtime national sports columnist now at The Washington Post, panelist on ESPN’s “Around the Horn,” professor of journalism at the University of Maryland, and an occasional contributor to NPR and PBS. He co-produced and co-wrote Imagining the Indian: The Fight Against Native American Mascoting, a 2022 documentary on the history of and fight against mascoting Native Americans. He has also authored academic journal articles on diversity in sports media and hagiography in sports film documentary.

Kevin will share with us why he did the film Imagining the Indian, which is at the natural crossroad of sport, identity and politics.

Blackistone started his journalism career at The Boston Globe. He has worked at The Chicago Reporter, a monthly investigative magazine on Chicago’s racial and social issues; The Dallas Morning News, where he covered economics before moving to the sports page for the next 16 years; AOL Sports; and now The Washington Post. He’s also been with ESPN for the last 20 years.

He’s covered just about everything everywhere, including Nelson Mandela’s U.S. tour, the Summer Olympics, the Super Bowl, Wimbledon, the World Cup, the Tour de France, the British Open, the NBA Finals, the Final Four, the national college football championship, the NFL playoffs, the Major League Baseball playoffs, world championship boxing matches and other events more than once.

Blackistone is a recipient of numerous awards, including recently the 2023 Sport History and Social Justice Award by the North American Society for Sport History.

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