Fuss over California school's Arab mascot prompts a wider debate

On game days in a California town named Thermal, where date farms and desert surroundings evoke the Middle East and nearby communities have names like Mecca and Oasis, fans cheer a high school team known as the Arabs.

A belly dancer jiggles on centre court. And a black-haired, moustached mascot wearing a head scarf rallies the crowd.

At least that's the way it was done for decades in the community 200 kilometres southeast of Los Angeles until Arab Americans recently objected to a hook-nosed, snarling image used to represent Coachella Valley High School.

The school has agreed to give the mascot a makeover, but not to drop the nickname.

"We're still going to stick with the Arab," said school board president Lowell Kemper after scores of residents defended the tradition dating back generations. "It's just a matter of whether we have a change in the caricature of the mascot."

It's a twist on a decades-old issue that has centred primarily on Native American mascots, logos and nicknames and has transformed Indians to Cardinals at Stanford University and Chieftains to Redhawks at Seattle University.

But the Arab debate spurs the same set of questions: is it possible to craft a mascot in the image of an ethnic group that doesn't offend, or are schools better off scrapping the idea altogether?