Rutgers Votes To Change Their Mascot Because It's White With Blue Eyes And Doesn't Represent Diversity

NEW BRUNSWICK — Since its debut in 1955, the Rutgers University Scarlet Knight has appeared in several incarnations.

Once a real person on horseback, helmeted, caped and plumed, the mascot for a time switched to riding a mechanical horse. Later, the Scarlet Knight took to foot as a fully-costumed figure with an oversize head to boot.

Now, 60 years after the campus grew tired of the chicken-looking Rutgers Chanticleer, the school’s student government is calling for another mascot makeover.

A bill passed by the the Rutgers University Student Assembly calls for more gender and ethnic diversity in the mascot costume, according to a report by The Daily Targum, the school’s student newspaper.

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All I can say is, about time. I mean it’s 2015. We’re supposedly as open and diverse and accepting as ever before in history, and yet we STILL have these disgusting personifications of White culture all over our campuses. College campuses, which are in theory soooo progressive, being represented…no, terrorized.. by these gigantic white cartoon characters.

Since the initial adoption of the Scarlet Knight mascot in 1955 and its several transformations in the succeeding decades, the mascot has stormed fields, courts and countless parades sporting largely Caucasian features. A recent student government bill is looking to diversify the Scarlet Knight by adding a couple of mascot friends, but questions linger in the air about student, staff and alumni responses.

The Rutgers University Student Assembly recently passed a bill intended to support ethnic and gender diversity by adding multiple Scarlet Knights that could be black, Latino, Asian, female or third gender in addition to the existing Caucasian Scarlet Knight, said Emmet Brennan, student assembly parliamentarian.

“What we were thinking — the way the bill’s laid out — it’s not defined that we need an Asian knight, a black knight, a Latino knight,” said Brennan, a School of Environmental and Biological Sciences first-year student. “That we would really leave it up to the different student organizations … and basically the student body as a whole to determine how many knights they’d like and what these knights would represent.”

Brennan said he founded the idea behind the bill working as a press box server at a football game, where he noticed the mascot had blue eyes and light skin.

“This does not seem right,” Brennan said. “Our mascot does not represent how diverse we are as a school.”

“What we were really hoping is that this would be a discussion with the entire student body,” he said. “So we would have a working committee of the different multicultural (organizations), possibly the Queer Caucus — basically students who represent a unique voice, and have them all working together at the same table to make sure red flags that arise with any of those groups — that mascot would immediately be tabled.” [Daily Targum]

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And it’s not just the Scarlet Knight. He’s got a whole merry band of college cohorts enforcing the white male status quo all over the country.

(How convenient, they found a way to make an orange tiger have a predominantly white face.)

And while we’re at it, look at this motherfucker. The ringleader.

Basically the symbol of White Power in Michigan State. Disgusting. Might as well just have a gigantic Clayton Bigsby roaming the sidelines.

Clean it up, major universities. A post-racial society begins with a diverse enormous puffy animal suit for a drunk college kid and former Spirit Club leader to wear during football games, I’ve always said that.