Endless Thread - There Was An Attempt

Episode Date: March 2, 2018

A small village in upstate New York faced a lot of criticism about its official seal. They decided to change it, but did it really make a difference? You might say... there was an attempt.

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I am awkwardly standing in a CVS parking lot in a village in upstate New York preparing to ask Randos a somewhat uncomfortable question. What's your name? My name is Ernest Henderson. Where are you from? Utica, New York. I live in Whitefield.

And you moved here? About a year ago. How do you like it? It's all right. To me, it's a little fun. out here, but it's all right. I can deal with it. Tell me what you mean. What I mean about the cops out here, because when I first moved out here at Barnardier, the cops asked me what I'm doing out here. And I'm looking at him like, what do you mean? What I'm doing all here? I'm

looking at my skin. Like, what do you mean? He said, getting the car, I'm going to take the jury. I said, no, I'm not under a rush. I'm going, you follow me. You follow me home. So he followed me to the apartment building. Really? That was the last time I had an incident with them. And what did he ever explain why? No, he never explained why. Okay. Ernest is a black man. And as a white man, I can't easily relate to his experience with the local cops. What I can do is understand that this story probably sounds familiar to a lot of people. Still, there is something a little funny about this village, as Ernest says.

This village, which, by the way, is called Whitesboro. The word funny can mean different. things. It can mean actually humorous or it can mean just off. And believe it or not, what's funny about Whitesboro isn't its name. The thing that's funny about Whitesboro is the village seal, the official image that is on trucks, signs, and other places around here. Ernest Henderson has seen it. I think you're talking about that little sign that got there about the Indian thing? Yeah, that's pretty messed up. Yeah. I didn't notice that into my girl. We was walking down by the park one day. And my girl said, oh, that's pretty fucked up. And she said, look at this.

We started talking about it. It's kind of messed up. But they got messed up signs, a lot of places, you know, where the land they took from India and stuff. They do a lot of messed up stuff. Yeah. Everybody should just get along with us, you know. We are human.

We bleed the same damn blood. What the fuck? But these things, these simple truths, we lose sight of them because the devil's in the details, right? Details like people wanting to preserve history and other people look at. at an image the same image and seeing just another reinforcement of centuries of racism. This image, which depicts a white settler wrestling a Native American to the ground,

was the subject of a Reddit post that created a huge chorus of Internet voices, which eventually drew national television cameras, and a lot of attention to this village of a few thousand people. This post, along with some stand-up comedy, brought the village of Whitesboro to a kind of reckoning. To try to fix the problem for good. Maybe. Maybe not. We're calling today's episode,

There Was an Attempt, Sort of. I'm Ben Brock Johnson, and this is Endless Thread. A show featuring stories found in the vast ecosystem of online communities called Reddit. I'm here with my co-producer, Amory Sieverts. We are coming to you from WBUR, Boston's NPR Station, and we are making this show with little help from our friends at Reddit. Hey, Amory. Hey.

I think we should describe this village seal in greater detail because I think it's important. Yeah, so the seal depicts a supposed historical event, a quote-unquote friendly wrestling match between Hugh White, the guy the village is named after, and the chief of the Oneida Native American tribe. Or so the story goes. And it's like this circle like so many town seals are. There's actually a few different versions of the seal. The oldest one was created sometime in the 1800s, I think. And in this oldest version, there is a clear winner here. Hugh White is standing almost straight up,

and the Native American is like almost horizontal. Yeah, and their arms are interlocking, and this is where things get tricky, because Hugh White's arms look pretty close to the Native American's neck. And then there's this newer version from the 1960s, And in this version, the Native American is like a little more vertical, but there's still a clear winner in this wrestling match. And that's Hugh White.

And we should also point out that the Oneida chief is depicted with bright red skin. A few years ago, there was a lot of debate around the Confederate flag, and whether it should be flown proudly or retired because of its connection to slavery and racism. And one thing that's kind of surprising about the Confederate flag, at least to me, is that you see it up north. Like, I've seen it all over upstate New York, not far actually from the area of Whitesboro. Which begs the question of, why are people in the north, way above the Mason-Dixon line, displaying the flag of a movement that was effectively pro-slavery and lost the Civil War more than 150 years ago? And this is a question that was also in the mind of Reddit user Loki God of Chaos, or as I call him, Matt.

Matt Boleris. I'm from Rome, New York originally, and I just moved out to Utica about last year. Can you tell me your story? So two years ago, back at the height of the whole controversy over the Confederate flag down south, I just decided to upload a picture of the Whitesboro Town seal. So I think I put a title up with all like the talk of racist flags in the south, look at this seal from Whitesboro, New York, because it looks like something out of Parks and Rec, where a white guy is choking an Indian and it's on all of their vehicles, it's in the park. Matt is, of course, talking about the popular NBC show Parks and Recreation,

which follows small town government official Leslie Knope, aka Amy Poehler, and her misadventures, which include dealing with some pretty insensitive imagery regarding Native Americans that often exists on government property. the white-bred townspeople in the show always managed to be culturally insensitive. So there are 10 murals here in this hallway, and this is called the trial of Chief Womapo. It was painted in 1936, and this is Chief Womapo, and he was convicted of crimes against the soldiers. I am always amazed at his quiet dignity right before he's killed by a cannonball. I'm surprised no one's complained about this.

Oh, tons of people have. Yeah, we get letters every day. On Parks and Rec, it's funny. In real life, Matt's Post goes viral because it's this nexus of funny and funny. Perfect for the R-slash funny community. I've actually posted it early in the day, didn't check Reddit at all,

and I come back later in the afternoon, and it's got like 5,000 up votes, and it's hitting the front page. and just flooded with comments. Matt watches the post pop off, then he forgets about it, a few months go by, then one day. I'm eating lunch watching the local news,

and I see controversy surrounding local town seal pop up on the news channel. So I'm watching that, and I'm just thinking, oh, like I was the one who kind of brought this small town to Reddit's attention, and then it kind of dispersed out from Reddit. And then a few months later, I want to say January, they announced that they were going to have an actual election

to change the town seal or see if the town seal needed to be changed, which, from what I understand was because the Daily Show had picked up the story, went to the town and said, basically, we'll come up with all these ideas, it would be a great bit. And they were choosing things like the Native-Mexamination, American and the Hugh White strangling a British guy. Or they did a professional wrestling-styled one. I think they did one with like a fist bump.

They had all these different selections that they had thought would be not just funny, but would be better than the original one. The Daily Show comes and does a whole segment on Whitesboro's Village Seal. America is under attack. Take this small town, for example. They have an official seal that's represented their village for over 100 years. Now, American Indian activist Ben Miller wants it taken down, just because it was his few.

And during the segment, they bring up something else that was kind of in the ether at the time. Haven't you guys done enough? I mean, you already made the Redskins change the logo. No, we haven't made the Redskins change the logo. They didn't even thinking about it. So you didn't make them change the logo? No. Y'all need to get to work on that because that is so fucked up.

Update, by the way, the Redskins still haven't changed their logo, but pressure is mounting after the Cleveland Indians announced this year they would phase out Chief Wahoo, following decades of people pointing out that its depiction of a Native American chief was pretty racist. And Ben Miller, the guy you heard in that Daily Show clip, he got back to us when we reached out to him, and he put us in touch with another area resident who also played a role in this. Okay, I am A.J. Foster, a stand-up.

comic from the Bronx, New York. Anything else you'd like to know there? It's probably helpful to know that AJ is black, which for a comedian in a village called Whitesboro makes for some good material. I like reverse gentrifying places. That's my conquest in life. AJ moved to Whitesboro after graduating from college in Utica,

about 10 minutes away. Did you ever, like, think about the name when you moved there? Oh, of course, yeah. That was one of the first things. I told people where I was moving, they were like, come again? What? You're going away? But it was, I mean, it was just close to the campus, and I got a cheap apartment, so I didn't care what it was called.

Is it fair to say you were in the minority there? Oh, that's very fair, very, very fair to say. Here's how AJ describes it in one of his stand-up sets. A little town where I went to school in a small village in upstate New York called White Sparrow. Or as I used to call it, White'sboro plus one. because apparently I was the only brother that had ever lived there and they had to make sure I was accounted for and their precious borough was no longer pure white.

AJ first noticed Whitesboro's seal on the side of a snowplow. And I'm just looking like, did I really just see that? To the blind eye, it looked like a white guy strangling a Native American. One guy, he's fairly pale, he's got long, dark hair, and then the guy that, you know, he's choking. as a redskin guy a bald head with a feather attached to the top of his head

and he just looks like he's in agony and he's getting strangled out the seal is actually supposed to depict a friendly wrestling match they said Hugh White came to town and this was a ritual for the the Oneida but it didn't look like that

and that was my whole thing I was like I understand where you guys are coming from with the history but this looks really bad Like, can we show your history in a better way? That's what it felt like. But you know who didn't understand where some of the villagers were coming from? The Oneida Indian Nation, which, according to a spokesperson, has zero record that this so-called

friendly wrestling match between Hugh White and the Oneida Chief even took place. So the history is controversial. But even if this match did go down the way the village of Whitesboro says it did, you got to wonder, why make the image of a white man physically attacking a Native American the village seal? You know, the equivalent would be having a, you know, look at a sign that

showed a black man in chains and being whipped. You know, I don't want to be reminded of slavery all the time. That's offensive. I don't care how your town was founded. Yeah, most of this country was, you know, built on that. But I understood the Native Americans from that perspective.

I understood the other side, you know, from the locals, from their perspective, I don't think they were willing to see the other side, though. So AJ used the sharpest tool he had to tackle the issue. White'sboro has been in the news, gained some national attention,

because the official town seal for the village of White'sboro actually looks like a white guy choking out a Native American. And that's very sad. No one should laugh at that. But me being a local comic, I thought it would be a funny idea to mock this sign. This is my former protest.

I go in front of town hall, and they got the image posted. That's a picture of me, choking a white name. The people of Weissboro did not laugh at that at all. They did not appreciate that. And they put my picture in the news like I was a serial choker or something. I'm like, I didn't go around choking everyone.

I choked one dude. It was my friend Larry, and he posed for the picture. I mean, I was like, relax. No white folks are actually harmed it. AJ shared that picture on his Instagram and Facebook pages. And then it just blew up. And one day I looked at my phone and the notifications just wouldn't stop because it was getting shared.

hundreds of times a day. I was getting, like, I would almost say fan mail from a lot of Native Americans around the country. I was getting emails from people in Montana, Phoenix, Idaho, Iowa,

just all over the place saying, oh, hey, you're the guy from the picture. We saw it. We looked you up. But as we heard from AJ's stand-up set, some of the people from Whitesboro weren't pleased.

They started calling me the Whitesboro Choker. Like, I was a villain or something like that. And I'm like, come on, people. It's not that serious. I was getting dirty looks all around.

So they almost kind of ran me out of town. That's why I'm back down here in New York City in Brooklyn now because I was like, I can't be around here anymore. Is that real? I mean, they, like, you really felt you reached a point where you didn't feel comfortable in town. Yeah, no, I didn't. The mayor reached out to me and he said he wanted to sit down and have lunch and talk about this, but that never actually panned out.

Why do you think that is? Why do I think that is? I don't think he actually cared for. that much. The daily show came in the town. They did a piece about it where, you know, they took a vote. They took a vote. Technically, it was an opinion poll.

How did the town poll go? Results, uh, not very satisfying. Let's listen to the end of the bit that Stephen Colbert eventually did on the village seal. I forgot. I forgot to tell you the headline here, the town voter to keep it.

I almost let that out of the story. So it has a happy ending. In that, I probably get to make some more jokes about this in the future. Ooh, Ben, that is a rough end to the story. I know, but it's not totally the end, right? Not totally, because in a minute, we're going to hear a little more from the residents of Whitesboro. At Radio Lab, we love nothing more than nerding out about science, neuroscience, chemistry. But, but we do also like to get into other kinds of stories.

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Reach new audiences. Whatever your goal, we can help. Discover how the magic is made at WBUR.org slash creative studio. Okay. So we've got this awkward village seal that the residents of Whitesboro decided to keep, despite all of this negative tension from the outside. And when I went to Whitesboro a few weeks ago, I really wanted to talk to some folks who lived there.

And Whitesboro is really small. Like, the main drag has a main intersection. It is on Main Street. There is a tattoo parlor, a VFW, and a pizzeria. Joe's Pizza. I talked to the owner. He wasn't keen to talk on the record. He said he was afraid of getting political and driving away business.

Not that Joe's pizza seems to have a lot of local competition. But I did find a couple of young customers eating some chicken nuggets and watching hockey highlights. One of them was Drew Hastings, his dad, a locksmith in town, was featured in that daily show segment. Drew, your dad was on TV. Yep. He was the guy who said, don't change it. Yeah, he wanted to keep history. Because?

There's no reason to change it. Just people think we're racist, but we're not. Do you feel like it was like a big deal in the town or no? For some people, it might have been for the older people in the town, but not. Mostly younger people who probably didn't really. care. Just live here.

How long have you lived here? 16 years. Are you 16? I am. All right. Fair enough. Outside, another local, Chris Brown was waiting for his pizza.

I asked him if he knew the story of the seal. That's stupid. It's just that's what they're, it's been here for years, I guess. So I don't think that's a big deal. Been here forever.

Okay, not talkative necessarily. but definitely an opinion. But Amory, we did have one conversation with a much more official village of Whitesboro person. Yeah, a Whitesboro official, in fact. And we called her because something happened. Something kind of

big, at least for the village of Whitesboro, though by then the camera crews had left. Village of Whitesboro. Hi, is this Dana? It is. Hi, Dana. This is Amory calling from WBUR in Boston. How are you? I'm good. How are you? Good. Dana only is the village.

clerk. She traded emails with us early on in reporting this story, and she knows a lot of the details. Can you tell me a little bit about the event, the particular thing that is at the center of the town seal? I'm sorry, the village seal. Thank you. I know. You're going to have to catch me on that. Tell me about... That's a common thing. Okay, so tell me about the event that is at the center of the village seal for Whitesboro. Well, what the story is, is that back in the day... And again, we have to say, Emery, that the Oneida Nation has no record of this story being fact. It was a long time ago, sure, but in truth, it may have never actually happened. It might just be a story that the white people tell.

And why was this wrestling match so important to the founding of Whitesboro, important enough that it became the village seal? Well, because this is what helped garnered the good relations. between the two groups. To get more specific, it shows the white man's hands appear to be on the Native Americans' neck, or close to his neck. Well, they're on his shoulders. Okay, okay.

So there was a village-wide vote in January of 2016 to see if the seal should be changed. And the village people actually voted to keep the seal as it was. It was a non-binding opinion poll. It wasn't an unofficial vote. But then less than two weeks after that, you know, non-binding opinion poll was conducted, the village decided to update it after all. Wait, we have to pause here for a second because we haven't actually told you this yet. Last fall in 2017, the town changed its seal once and for all, or for now at least.

And this happened after the town had voted in the poll to not change it. Dana explains it like this. The same residents that voted to keep it also came to meetings and said, well, I mean, we still want it to be the wrestling match. We don't want that to change, but you know, you can change it to look better, you know, to be a technically better drawing and to have the correct attire on the individuals. So that's what we did. So I talked to a spokesperson for the Oneida Indian Nation, and they provided me with a press release from January of 2016 saying that the Oneida Nation and the village of Whitesboro would be working together on putting together that new seal, on updating the seal.

But the spokesperson said that that didn't end up happening, that the new seal was rolled out without ever consulting the Oneida Nation. Do you know why that is? They just never got a time that they could all meet together. The United Nations wanted it in their area. It's certain times of the day, during the daytime. Not everybody could get together at the same time. Okay. Did you hear at all from the Oneida Nation after the new seal was unveiled?

Did they weigh in at all? I know the mayor did and that they, you know, wondered why they hadn't been included in the redesign. But again, we tried to get together with them, and it just, it never panned out. And it's how long do you drag it out when, you know, we corrected the things that needed to be corrected, like I said, the attire and the headdress and stuff, because I know they had an issue with that because it wasn't correct. Okay. So if they weren't consulted, do you know who, um, was consulted to make sure that you corrected those kind of factual inaccuracies,

like with the headdress, for example? Just when you, actually, you can go on several websites for the Native Americans in the Unitas and see what the headdress was and the pioneer, so-called attire, for back on the day for the settlers. Okay, so that research was done separately. Gotcha. Amory, I have to say that I'm a little surprised. that after everything, the town still failed to effectively schedule a meeting with the Oneida Indian Nation to collaborate on the new seal.

Like, this is really ironic to me. The seal itself is supposed to show this kind of coming together of these two groups, this meeting that was supposedly a good thing. And yet in 2017, hundreds of years later, the local Native American group and the local government couldn't even make a meeting happen. Yeah. I mean, we're calling this episode, there was an attempt, because it suggests, failure. Like, there was an attempt to make a great seal that accurately showed this part of the village's history, or at least the village lore. And supposedly, there was an attempt to update the seal, but the Oneida weren't involved in that process. So there seemed to be a lot of misconnections in this story. And I got to say, I don't love the new seal, to be honest, but I do think it's fair to

say that the new seal is better than the old one. So, progress? Yeah, but not without some pain. Most progress, I guess, seems to work that way. Also, I asked Matt if he felt badly about the fact that his viral Reddit post helped start this whole business. Oh, definitely. Like, I had no clue I would unleash this whole thing on them. Apparently, the office was getting tons of calls, tons of emails, or website was getting bombarded. I did start feeling, like, really bad that, oh, like, I put this lens on this tiny little town. But in the end, you feel like it's a good thing. Oh, yeah. I think it brought us into the current

century. And the new seal is really good-looking. I think it's a great depiction of what it was originally trying to depict. Also, it seems like AJ, the comedian, does have a few fond memories of living in White Sparrow, even though he's long gone. It was sad when I moved through the town because I was just getting to the point where I was starting to embrace my role as the only black guy in town. Like, do you know how long it took me to infiltrate this system? I'm not trying to share this with anyone else. Like, they all love me now. You love me. You were baking me shows, get homemade cookies and cupcakes, banana bread.

I never even knew about banana bread before I moved to Whitesboro, and that stuff is delicious. Do you feel like comedy is an effective way of tackling this stuff? A lot of people say that it's the job of a stand-up comic to tackle, you know, some of these sensitive issues. especially with everything that's going on in America right now. If you go up there with something that's well-crafted, you know, well-intentioned, and you're speaking on real issues and actually making people laugh at the end of the day, that's what this is all about, I guess. AJ, thanks a lot for talking with us.

Thank you, Ben. Thanks for having me. AJ's point that we can all hopefully laugh about this stuff as a universal way of acknowledging it reminds me of earned. The guy I talked to in the CVS parking lot. We bleed the same blood. Yeah. And when you get down to it, maybe moving forward on some of this stuff, if it helps remind us that we're all just human beings, is a worthy cause.

Man, Amory, if that is not a Leslie Knope Parks and Rec Hallmark Cards, small town government official speech at the dedication of something super cheesy. It should be. I'm not crying, Ben. You're crying. Someone's cutting onions. Let's get out of here before we all start singing kumbaya. Hey, by the way, we have a link to AJ Foster's tour schedule and his social media stuff on our website, WBUR.org slash Enlist Thread.

I accept Facebook friend request them just about anybody unless you're a dude and you're not wearing a shirt and your profile picture. Because I've got an iPhone. It's a touchscreen. I don't like touching on male nipples while I'm navigating through my Facebook app. Noted, A.J. Noted. Enlist Thread is a production of WBUR, Boston's NPR station in PEOPR. partnership with Reddit. Our show is a dream realized by Jessica Alpert, who, when we ask if she likes the episode we've put together, she always says, No, no, no, no, yes. Iris Adler is our executive producer, and she makes sure our stories meet the bar of mildly interesting. Mix and sound design by John Parati and Paul Vikas, who truly believe that we are our web producer is Megan Kelly, who looks at our attempts at writing web copy

and always says, our intern is Chris Yulian, who when we put him on a task. He politely says, Hold on dear. Michael Pope is our advisor at Reddit, and whenever we tell him our ideas for episodes, he's like, Simpsons did it. Lots of production help this week from Josh Swartz, who looks at our script rework and says it looks like Bad Taxidermy?

Our theme music is by Squelcher. We are also on Reddit. Endless underscore Thread is our username. This week's episode art was the Village Seal of Whitesboro, but we usually use art from Redditors, so if you want to make art for an upcoming episode, hit us up. Next week's episode is going to be about the famous

Reddit story of our Bradbury 1920 if you need inspiration. Oh hey, suggest a story too. If you want, we love us some tips. That's how this week's episode came to be. Thanks to Matt for PMing us. Hey, by the way, in a few weeks, we are going to South by Southwest.

Want to hang? We'll be talking podcasting at the Belmont in Austin, Texas on Tuesday, March 13th at 11 a.m. Come, maybe we'll eat some tacos with you or something. You should know our show is produced by Amory Sieverts. I am senior producer and host Ben Brock Johnson. I'll let myself out.