World Series 2021 – It’s past time for the Atlanta Braves to move on from the chop

ATLANTA — Each of the next three days, a baseball stadium will dim its lights, thousands of people will illuminate the flashlights on their phones and they will engage in a wildly ahistorical, fundamentally problematic and altogether unnecessary ritual. The tomahawk chop, rubber-stamped earlier this week by the commissioner of baseball, will be broadcast on screens across the United States and around the world, and it will serve as a reminder that for all the progress made in eradicating unnecessary American Indian symbolism, it remains deeply embedded in sports.

On Tuesday, Major League Baseball delivered a weak, mealy-mouthed affirmation of the chop, a staple at Atlanta Braves games, which relied on canyon-sized gaps of logic and epitomized the tail wagging the dog. And as Truist Park hosts the Braves and Houston Astros in Games 3, 4 and 5 of the World Series this weekend, a vast-majority-white crowd will pack a stadium in the middle of the suburbs, bend their arms 90 degrees from vertical to horizontal and scream in defiance of those who see it for what it is.

Which is, of course, something destined to go away, like the former Washington Football Team name, the Chief Wahoo logo and countless other examples of Native American imagery in sports. It’s what made the position of the commissioner, Rob Manfred, so perplexing. To see him try to explain why MLB was backing the chop was to see an anthropomorphic pretzel twisting itself in real time.

“It depends on the way the community perceives the gesture, and in Atlanta they’ve done a great job with the Native Americans,” Manfred said. “I think the Native American community is the most important group to decide whether it’s appropriate or…