I’m writing in response to insensitive political commentary appearing in Chip Ainsworth’s recent columns. A few weeks ago he warned readers off participating in BLM protests. This past Saturday he relates having commiserated with one of his buddies from Cleveland about how “the East Coast Elites” are driving the agenda to change the name of the Cleveland Indians. In both cases he’s showing his insensitivity about what’s going on in the country at this moment. As a sports reporter he surely must be aware that the majority of the professional athletes in this country (across all ethnicities and genders) support BLM.

In the first case, when BLM activists or their allies take a knee, it’s not to disparage or devalue our local police (certainly not here in Conway!). In the case of Saturday’s comments about the imminent name change of the Cleveland ball club (and one assumes the Washington NFL team soon as well), it’s not about lack of loyalty to the teams either. (In fact we have a poster hanging in my daughter’s room of my mother’s cousin, then player manager Lou Boudreau, standing with Larry Doby, the first Black player in the American League, which was taken a dozen or so years before the Red Sox became the last team in the league to integrate, so we too have some degree of loyalty to the Cleveland team.)

However uncomfortable it may be, the facts are simply that we all live on stolen land, and benefit from its riches, as well as from our powerful economy, which was established and literally built by slave labor. And by and large the descendants of native people and slaves do not. After hundreds of years of broken contracts, inferior schools, police profiling and now a blatantly racist and anti-immigrant administration, of course people of color are upset, and in my opinion those of us with any sensitivity have got to understand that and support them.

And while it’s true that changing the names of the sports teams is to some degree merely symbolic and not as consequential as it would be to, for example, change the way schools are funded or eliminate such practices as redlining by banks and other vestiges of Jim Crow, these team name changes, in addition to the removal of lost cause monuments, are nonetheless necessary statements for our society to make at this time.

Racist symbols have long been embedded throughout our society, and have inflicted pain on their victims for generations. So please let’s consign the names of these teams to the dustbin of history where they belong, alongside Aunt Jemima, Tonto, Charlie Chan and Amos ‘N Andy.

Amherst native and now Duke University professor William Darity and his wife, Kirsten Mullen, have written an excellent book detailing the history of slavery and its historical and continuing impacts, entitled: “From Here to Equality” (UNC Press). Helpful for those of us interested in understanding this history. Among other things, they show that if Lincoln’s plan to give all freedmen “40 Acres and a Mule” had been implemented (his successor, Andrew Johnson, was unfortunately an avowed white supremacist and quickly eliminated this program), and had been able to hold on to the value of that property over the ensuing generations, the wealth gap between Black and white in this country would not be nearly so extreme.

Andy Jaffe is a resident of Conway.