Texas Rangers Face Pressure To Change Team Name Due To The Police Force’s Alleged ‘Cruel, Racist’ History
Now that activists have managed to get the Washington Redskins to change their name, they’re looking to cleanse all sport from anything that they deem offensive.
ESPN’s Buster Olney saw this coming.
Back on June 14, Olney wrote, “Given the current context in this country, with so much of its history under reexamination, it will be interesting to see if the owners of the Texas Rangers will be pressured to consider a change.”
Shortly after that, Chicago Tribune columnist, Steve Chapman sounded the alarm about the “problematic” appellation. In his column, Chapman said that the name Rangers “is an affront to Hispanics, African Americans and anyone who favors racial equity. It should be an intolerable embarrassment to the owners and fans.”
Steve Chapman wrote that the Rangers were “revered” in Texas but “the legends omit a lot of the reality.” Chapman cites the book “Cult of Glory: The Bold and Brutal History of the Texas Rangers” by Doug J. Swanson as the main reason for the organization to change the name.
“They burned peasant villages and slaughtered innocents,” Swanson wrote in the book. “They committed war crimes. Their murders of Mexicans and Mexican Americans made them as feared on the border as the Ku Klux Klan in the South.”
Chapman added: “A century ago, during the fighting that took place along the border during the Mexican Revolution, blood flowed like the Rio Grande.”
According to Swanson’s book, “The terms ‘death squads’ and ‘ethnic cleansing’ would not enter common usage for another sixty years or so but that was what the Rangers were and what they did.”
Source: Fox News
But they’re not alone.
On Monday, Karen Attiah, the Washington Post‘s Global Opinions Editor, went full-Karen in her attempt to shame the franchise into reconsidering their moniker.
Attiah, who was raised in Dallas after her family emigrated from Ghana, attended many Rangers games growing up. She said that she didn’t think twice about the name until she learned the history behind it. In her article, Attiah wrote that the Texas Rangers was a “cruel, racist” force that was “founded to clear the land of Indian for white settlers.” She added that the team’s name is “not so far off from being called the Texas Klansmen.”
But it didn’t stop in just the early days, says Attiah. Citing the same book that Chapman did, Doug J. Swanson’s Cult of Glory: The Bold and Brutal History of the Texas Rangers, Attiah explains just how brutal and racist the Texas Rangers were.
‘The Rangers oppressed black people, helping capture runaway slaves trying to escape to Mexico; in the aftermath of the Civil War, they killed free blacks with impunity,’ she wrote.
‘In the early 20th century, Rangers played a key role in some of the worst episodes of racial violence in American history along the Texas-Mexico border.
‘Mexicans were run out of their homes and subject to mass lynchings and shootings. The killings got so out of control that the federal government threatened to intervene.’
Attiah quoted author Doug J Swanson, who wrote in his new book Cult of Glory: The Bold and Brutal History of the Texas Rangers: ‘In service to Anglo civilization’s slow march, they functioned as executioners. Their job was to seize and hold Texas for the white man.’
She goes on to argue that ‘Ranger racism is not an artifact of the distant past,’ charging that the Rangers were ‘called on to protect white supremacy into the 1960s’ and even helped prevent school integration.
Source: Daily mail
As the entire sports world gets “woke” and goes anti-cop, the Rangers had been attempting to distance themselves from their ties to law enforcement.
A statement by the team last month read, “While we may have originally taken our name from the law enforcement agency, since 1971 the Texas Rangers Baseball Club has forged its own, independent identity.” It continued, “The Texas Rangers Baseball Club stands for equality. We condemn racism, bigotry and discrimination in all forms.”
Not good enough says Attiah. “If the team ownership, as it proclaims, condemns ‘racism, bigotry and discrimination in all forms,’ there is an easy way for it to prove that. The Texas Rangers’ team name must go,” she wrote.
Poor Texas Rangers management! You don’t realize that you’ll never be woke enough. The wokescolds will not rest until they have remade the world in their own image–all “problematic” names will be purged forever. The thing is, many names can be considered “problematic”–it just depends on who it is that you ask.
Consider yourselves warned Cleveland Indians, Atlanta Braves, Pittsburgh Pirates, New York Yankees, Washington Nationals, Kansas City Royals, Los Angeles Angels, San Diego Padres, San Francisco Giants, and every team named after an animal–you’re all next.
But not all of us think that the Rangers are “problematic.”
ClashDaily‘s Big Dawg, Doug Giles has a painting honoring the Texas Rangers.
This group of men embodies the old adage, “Don’t mess with Texas.”
