In a world where no one wants to offend anyone else for fear of getting their butt kicked and being called a racist, one game tossed that kind of political correctness to the curb and beat it with a baseball bat. That game is Cowboys & Indians. It’s the racially charged version of Cops & Robbers and if Native Americans saw the game being played they’d be pissed, some may even say ‘scalping mad.’ No offense to my Native American readers, but this may be a section that you may want to skip if you don’t enjoy being stereotyped by bros. Just so you know, I do love Native Americans, in fact my favorite college football team is the Florida State Seminoles. But I apologize if you’re offended.

Possibly the most obviously racist part of the game is the noise that that is made by those who are the Indians. It’s created by taking one of your hands and cupping it just a bit, then you proceed to smack your mouth while making a noise that transforms your seemingly monotone sound into the noise that Indians apparently make. For future reference this noise will be called the “Abwabwa noise.” I’m assuming that while a group of Cowboys were out roaming the land, herding their cattle, they came across a tribe of Indians while they were doing some sort of rain dance. The cowboys heard the noises being made by the Indians and herded their cattle back to the ranch where the attempted to tell people what they had heard. Their pitiful efforts to recreate the noise have now caused generations of bros to think that Indians sound like people who are riding on a vibrating bed.

During a spirited match of Cowboys and Indians you can always tell which of your bros are the most patriotic. If they fight to be the Cowboys and say if you make them an Indians they’ll quit, these bros will be the ones protecting our borders in the future. They may also be a little bit racist, so you’ll have to run other tests throughout your friendship with them to get to the real truth of the matter. For instance, if everytime someone asks who knows a funny joke and they jump up and shout out a racist one, well they’re probably a bit racist. But the team they choose in Cowboys & Indians is going to be the earliest indicator of their racial preferences.

I’ve always been confused as to how someone actually wins the game of Cowboys & Indians since you can really kill anyone seeing as that’s considered illegal in our modern court systems. So if no blood of the other team will be shed, how do you know if the gun you’ve been making with your fingers and firing by saying “POW” is actually loaded? It’s quite the conundrum. I feel like if this principle of shooting was applied to real life then the old gangster events probably would be more humorous than they actually are and it’d be much easier to kill people who bad mouth you. (However, I do not condone the killing of those who bad mouth you.) Plus everyone except for hand or arm amputees would be packing heat at all times and I just don’t think that’s safe.

The real lesson here is that just because you make up a game in which people only pretend to be those of other ethnicities, it’s still pretty easy to construe it as racism. So watch out, play cops and robbers instead.