Now back to Sunday’s Super Bowl, which saw the Tampa Bay Buccaneers shock the defending champs from K.C. The Washington Post ran an op-ed that takes issue with the Bucs’ pirate imagery.
The writer — Jamie L.H. Goodall, a staff historian at the U.S. Army Center of Military History — argued that “while this celebration of piracy seems like innocent fun and pride in a local culture, there is danger in romanticizing ruthless cutthroats who created a crisis in world trade when they captured and plundered thousands of ships on Atlantic trade routes between the Americas, Africa, and Great Britain.”
Goodall went on to say that treating pirate imagery as no big deal “takes these murderous thieves who did terrible things — like locking women and children in a burning church — and makes them a symbol of freedom and adventure, erasing their wicked deeds from historical memory.”
She used the example of pirate legend José Gaspar — the “namesake” of Tampa’s annual “Gasparilla Pirate Festival” — who was one of many pirate “murderers who pillaged, raped and plundered their way through the Caribbean. And they were well-known enslavers who dehumanized Africans and Indigenous people, selling them for profit.” – READ MORE
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