Boston University has recently faced criticism for having named its mascot, Rhett the Terrier, after a character in the controversial book and film “Gone With the Wind.” President Robert Brown announced in an email Wednesday the formation of a committee that will consider renaming the mascot.
The nickname was adopted sometime after the novel was released in 1936, according to the University’s official website. When exactly it came into popular or official use is not clear.
Arcangelo Cella, who graduated from the College of Arts and Sciences in 2011 and School of Law in 2014, created a Change.org petition on June 21 asking the University to rename Rhett. In an interview with The Daily Free Press, Cella shared his views on the controversial associations the depiction brings to BU’s mascot and overall public image.
Read the transcript of our interview with Cella below. Excerpts have been edited for clarity.
Tell me about how your petition and this conversation got started.
Early last month, when HBO Max pulled ‘Gone With the Wind’ from streaming for a time when it added a disclaimer to it, I was having a conversation with some friends and one of them pointed out that she wondered if BU would change the mascot’s name because of the associations with Rhett Butler. And that got me thinking. So I reached out to President Brown by email and I laid out the conversation and what I viewed the problems with the Rhett name on the mascot to be, and asked him whether BU was considering a name change because I was curious whether there was any action going on in light of the HBO action. I didn’t get a response from that for about two weeks, really until [Wednesday].
About two weeks later I started the petition. In the first two days, just through me promoting it through my own network, it got 200 signatures, which I thought was very impressive. And I made an effort to promote it in other ways as well: on Twitter, through friends and I spoke to a Boston.com reporter. I definitely think that there’s support among alumni and the public for this.
What are the main issues you see with the film that reflect on our mascot, Rhett?
Rhett is a Confederate sympathizer in the movie. He is definitely pro-Confederacy. He says a number of racist things himself. He is verbally and emotionally and physically abusive to his wife, Scarlett O’Hara. And later on in the movie in the post-Civil War, Reconstruction part of it, he aids and abets some violence by a gang that in the movie, as a stand-in for the early Ku Klux Klan, they conduct a violent attack on a tent city that houses former slaves and they’re pursued by the Union Army. And Rhett Butler makes an excuse for them and hides them. So, he’s definitely taking part in anti-Reconstruction actions as well. He is a pretty negative character. That’s from a racial perspective.
From a feminist perspective as well, he has a really turbulent relationship with his wife. When she says she no longer wants any more children, he threatens to divorce her. He’s physically abusive. He ultimately abandons her. He speaks the famous line, ‘Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.’ That’s when he’s walking out the door and his wife says, ‘What will become of me?’ So he’s not a really positive character.
The movie overall, and I think this ties into why BU adopted the name to begin with, the movie and book were very popular in the 1930s and throughout the 20th century. But they are really an ode to the antebellum South. They glorify the South. They glorify slavery as part of the Southern way of life. They glorify slave owners as I think they call them ‘knights and their ladies’ in the prologue to the film. The slaves are very subservient. The slave owners are glorified. The war is viewed as this very bad thing that ends this beautiful Southern-fairytale way of life.
Margaret Mitchell, the author of the book, was the daughter of a Confederate soldier. By all accounts she just experienced fairytale stories about the Confederacy and the antebellum South when she was a child and she didn’t even really learn that the South had lost the war until she was about 10 years old. And apparently she never got over the shock and that kind of informs the way she wrote the book as this very glorifying story.
The movie doesn’t make any effort at all to contextualize slavery as a bad thing. It just seamlessly weaves it into this very high-class way of life that these Southerners were living prior to the war.
It also perpetuates this myth that certain slaves were treated as members of the family, which begs the question: if they were, why did the slaves in real life not hang around after they gained their freedom? It completely blows over that. And it shows certain slaves like the Mammy character or the Prissy character who is the sort of frivolous slave. They do stick around, because as the movie would have you believe, their life wasn’t so bad.
Scarlett O’Hara who was also part of this reference that BU makes. They named the mascot Rhett because Rhett is in love with Scarlett in the movie and our color is scarlet, so our mascot became Rhett. Scarlett herself is a slave owner. She beats her slaves. She says horrible things. ‘I ought to take a strap to you’ is one thing that she says.
By referring to the mascot as Rhett, pairing it with our color scarlet, it turns what would normally be a benign color into a second reference to another racist character in this racist movie. And it also perpetuates this idea that ‘Gone With the Wind’ is this culturally iconic movie. It is an iconic movie of the 20th century, but it does nothing to contextualize these characters as in an abusive relationship, as openly racist, as Confederates, traitors, resistors to Reconstruction. So making it a joke where all you’re playing on is a cute, romantic relationship between them isn’t the right way to be having these important conversations around race, the Confederacy, slavery and ‘Gone with the Wind’ and how it handles that.
Since March, students have been releasing petitions nearly weekly, calling the University to take various actions. This seems to be the first petition that was acknowledged by the administration. What do you have to say to that?
I’m very glad to have received acknowledgment from President Brown. He did email me personally. He responded to my two emails to him. What I understood from the email that was sent out to [the BU community] was that I wasn’t the only one and that the petition is not the only way that this concern was being raised. The language of the email sounds like other alumni had reached out, maybe some other people as well, and it could be not just now but at other times as well. But I do think that HBO’s move probably caught the University’s attention.
The reason, I think, that BU was probably taking an affirmative step here is because the Rhett name for BU is a public face, that cartoon dog. They sell stuffed animals, they have a diner named after him, the Admissions people tweet about him. He shows up to sports events with the name on his jersey. I remember in undergrad that one of the first things I learned at Orientation was about Rhett the Terrier.
I do think that it’s very odd for BU to use that name, given that as far as I know, the school doesn’t have any connections to the movie. So, there really is no way to justify this other than a joke that was inappropriate at the time and certainly hasn’t aged well.
The other thing is we are founded by abolitionists. We are the school of Martin Luther King [Jr.], Howard Thurman, many notable Black alumni, students, professors. It’s just a completely dissonant, incongruous thing for a school to be using.
Because it’s so public that way, it risks a lot of damage to the school’s public image and its relationship with its current students, its prospective students. It risks doing the school real harm, so I think the school is wise to be considering the change. And I think that if the school were to maintain the name, it would be doing some real social harm by continuing to contribute to this sort of pop culture that glorifies ‘Gone With the Wind’ and the ideas it stands for.
Students have spoken out arguing the University should be focusing its attention and resources into larger, more important issues related to race and justice. What do you have to say about that?
I would hope that the University might take action on racial justice in several ways in many directions. It’s not a zero-sum game. They can change the mascot’s name and also do other things, and I hope they do. There are many things, of course, they could be addressing and I hope that they do that.
Do you think there are any ways BU could be negatively impacted by renaming Rhett?
It depends on the new name they pick. The fact that they’ve convened a committee to consider the name change, I hope, will result in a very considerate decision that will have no negative impacts, but I couldn’t speculate as to what any negative impacts would be until the decision comes out.
I will say that one thing that could have a very negative impact is if the school decides not to change the name because President Brown’s email was pretty clear that the final decision has not been made. The committee was being convened to consider the question of whether the Rhett name should be retired. Now, if they consider that question and they decide not to make a change, I would view that very negatively and I think that many people would. If after that acknowledgment, the school decides to maintain this mascot name that alludes to ‘Gone With the Wind’ in a very flippant way, I think that would be very bad.
I’m going to keep the petition going. I don’t think that this is finished. The petition as it stands asked BU to take action to change the name, and that’s what BU has done: convened a committee to consider the question. I think that now we can change our goals to actually encourage the name change even more strongly.
This is one of the most ridiculous things I’ve heard of amidst all this social justice “renaming”. It’s a statue of a DOG !!! This man needs to get a life. Who cares what the dog is called?? Has he considered this?? What if a young man whose first name happens to be “Rhett” applies to the school for admission?? Would HE be denied based on his first name?? This lunacy has gone way too far.
This idiot is getting paid to teach, not start a petition about the dog’s name. He is exactly what is wrong with colleges and universities today. Social justice warriors don’t belong in the classroom. They stifle discussions and differing opinions and freedom of speech. People like this sicken me.
Sure it’s a zero sum game but BU in one moment laysoff and furloughs several employees to save money and then in the next moment they decide to consider changing Rhett’s name. A rebranding decision that will cost MILLIONS.
Leave it to a white man to make a stink about something that in the grand scheme of things doesn’t matter.
Mr. Cella won’t speculate what could happen if the committee decides not to change the mascot’s name but then he says that BU’s reputation will be affected in a negative way. The university’s reputation? Ofcourse, if his opinion is not agreed to by the committee, then he will “in courage the name change even more strongly”, i.e. demand that the committee agree with his request. I don’t have a opinion either way, but I find it rather objectionable when anyone asks for an opinion by a committee and then follows that up with a presuppose conclusion. Mr. Cella’s decisions on the movie, the mascot’s name, and the other objections he has are his, and his alone. Don’t express your opinions as gospel. We all can think independently and don’t need you to enlighten us with your retoric.