Texas Rangers - Now You're on the Clock - Name Must Go

[phdhorn 6224]

A la Washington Redskins (not the least ironical that The Rangers were the old D.C. team):

The Texas Rangers’ team name must go

Texas Rangers pitcher Corey Kluber throws to the plate in an intrasquad game during baseball practice at Globe Life Field in Arlington, Tex., on July 9. (Tony Gutierrez/AP)

Opinion by 

Karen Attiah

Global Opinions editor

July 13, 2020 at 11:06 a.m. CDT

As the Washington football team finally gives up its racist slur of a name, there is one major sports team that has avoided the spotlight and resisted meaningful engagement with the violent and racist implications of its name. To know the full history of the Texas Rangers is to understand that the team’s name is not so far off from being called the Texas Klansmen.

I grew up in Dallas, raised on myths about Texas Rangers as brave and wholesome guardians of the Texas frontier, helping protect innocent settlers from violent Indians. At church, boys could sign up to be Royal Rangers, the Christian equivalent of the Boy Scouts. I still remember the excitement when Chuck Norris himself, star of the television show “Walker, Texas Ranger,” came to visit my elementary school class.

My dad sometimes took my younger siblings and me to Arlington Stadium to watch the Rangers play. No state mythologizes itself quite like Texas, so of course, it made sense to have a team name that embodied that gauzy, self-regarding history. At the same time, being from a Ghanaian immigrant family, we weren’t that invested in baseball, or the team name. I just liked going because my dad would sometimes let me take sips of his Coca-Cola mixed with beer.

What we didn’t realize at the time was that the Rangers were a cruel, racist force when it came to the nonwhites who inhabited the beautiful and untamed Texas territory. The first job of the Rangers, formed in 1835 after Texas declared independence from Mexico, was to clear the land of Indian for white settlers.

That was just the start. 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. “The negroes here need killing,” a Ranger wrote in a local newspaper in 1877, after Rangers fired on a party of black former Buffalo soldiers, killing four of them and a 4-year old girl. A jury would later find that the black soldiers “came to their death while resisting officers in the discharge of their duty,” an unsettling echo of the justification for modern-day police killings.

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.

In his new book, “Cult of Glory: The Bold and Brutal History of the Texas Rangers,” Doug J. Swanson writes, “In service to Anglo civilization’s slow march, they functioned as executioners. Their job was to seize and hold Texas for the white man.”

But Ranger racism is not an artifact of the distant past. Rangers would be called on to protect white supremacy into the 1960s, deployed to prevent school integration. In 1956, when black students were attempting to take classes at all-white Texarkana Junior College, Rangers stood by as the mob attacked them — and threatened to arrest the black students. For their efforts, Swanson writes, they were rewarded with a chicken dinner from the White Citizens’ Council in Texarkana.

In anticipation of controversy from Swanson’s book, Dallas city officials quietly removed a 12-foot-tall statue of Ranger Jay Banks, the commanding officer who oversaw the efforts to prevent school integration, from Love Field airport. Perhaps city officials wanted to avoid the statue becoming a target of protest and heated public dialogue. As it stands now, the fate of the statue, which has been at Love Field since 1963, is uncertain. As a black Texan, I would shed no tears if Banks’s statue stayed locked in a dusty storage unit forever.

But there is no storage unit for the baseball team, whose owners have expressed no inclination to change the name. “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,” the team said in a statement. “The Texas Rangers Baseball Club stands for equality. We condemn racism, bigotry and discrimination in all forms."

This is revisionist history — and the team knows it. When the franchise, formerly the Washington Senators, moved to Texas in 1971, the Ranger name was met with protests, which were duly ignored.

It’s time to pay attention. “It may be argued that the team name honors the current agency, not the worst elements of its history,” Chicago Tribune columnist Steve Chapman, a native Texan, wrote last month, referencing the Rangers’ modern incarnation as an elite force. “But without the history and the legends, the franchise would not have adopted the name. No one would name a major league team ‘The Police’ or ‘The Highway Patrol.' "

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.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/07/13/texas-rangers-team-name-must-go/

[Post Oak 20349]

That's fine with me.  This org has brought me nothing but frustration and sadness. I love the Rangers, to my own detriment, but I won't die on this hill.

Game 6 is the worst sports experience of my life. I'll never get over it.

Change it and move on.  

Get some better logos and unis while you're at it.

[Helobious 9511]

When I was a kid I used to call them the Texas Gayngers. There was also the Oakland Gays, Tampa Gay Devil Gays, and Toronto Blue Gays. I was really funny. Fwiw those names would always be good for upvotes on the Yankee sites. Still are really.

[mdmost 43321]

I think they should go back to the Senators, just to add to the confusion. Texas Senators? WTF?

Edited July 14, 2020 by mdmost

[NorthLoop 14305]

Yeah ok Karen

[Beau Vine 54941]

2 hours ago, Post Oak said:

That's fine with me.  This org has brought me nothing but frustration and sadness. I love the Rangers, to my own detriment, but I won't die on this hill.

Game 6 is the worst sports experience of my life. I'll never get over it.

Change it and move on.  

Get some better logos and unis while you're at it.

Truth.  Have never liked the name, so I'd be happy to see it go. 

[WBT 20763]

She should be cancelled for coke mixed with beer

[formermav43 4606]

3 hours ago, mdmost said:

I think they should go back to the Senators, just to add to the confusion. Texas Senators? WTF?

Senators is an even more offensive term.

[UTPhil2006 3831]

Washington Post.

[Pato del Muerto 52902]

8 hours ago, formermav43 said:

Senators is an even more offensive term.

Yeah name a senate that doesn’t have a racist history. 

[jkates 316]

What a joke of an article. I know a couple of Rangers today - 1 used to be my neighbor - and they are fine men with no association to the Wild West. 

[Johnny Sack 8397]

Dumb

[NOMAAA 1696]

Texas Tittaaaays

[Vic Mackey 47394]

18 hours ago, Post Oak said:

That's fine with me.  This org has brought me nothing but frustration and sadness. I love the Rangers, to my own detriment, but I won't die on this hill.

Game 6 is the worst sports experience of my life. I'll never get over it.

Change it and move on.  

Get some better logos and unis while you're at it.

Same here. I could not care less if they changed the name. Fuck it.

And while we are at it, get a better front office and better development of the farm system, especially starting pitching.

[workswithseed 2141]

23 hours ago, Post Oak said:

That's fine with me.  This org has brought me nothing but frustration and sadness. I love the Rangers, to my own detriment, but I won't die on this hill. 

Game 6 is the worst sports experience of my life. I'll never get over it. Fuck the Cardinals.

Change it and move on. No.

Get some better logos and unis while you're at.

How about them Cowboys?

[Surly Bevo 25539]

Haven't they already stated that they won't be considering any name change.  On top of that their owner is a reclusive Baylor grad and the primary fanbase pulls from the reddest parts of Tarrant, Denton and Collin Counties. I'm not seeing this one without some significant mainstream media and corporate pressure and as a fan I can face the reality that this team doesn't have the history for anybody to have it firmly in its sights on a broader scale.

Edited July 15, 2020 by Surly Bevo

[workswithseed 2141]

15 minutes ago, Surly Bevo said:

Haven't they already stated that they won't be considering any name change.  On top of that their owner is a reclusive Baylor grad and the primary fanbase pulls from the reddest parts of Tarrant, Denton and Collin Counties. I'm not seeing this one without some significant mainstream media and corporate pressure and as a fan I can face the reality that this team doesn't have the history for anybody to have it firmly in its sights on a broader scale.

Yeah, they'd lose a lot of viewership. They already aren't doing so hot, then add this after building the new stadium. People (me included) didn't like Globe Life advertising itself and changing the stadium's name. As I've said before just call them the Texas Globe Lives.

[Post Oak 20349]

45 minutes ago, workswithseed said:

How about them Cowboys?

Well as a long suffering cowboy fan I say, as I say often in the fall, fuck them too.

[UTPhil2006 3831]

14 hours ago, Surly Bevo said:

Haven't they already stated that they won't be considering any name change.  On top of that their owner is a reclusive Baylor grad and the primary fanbase pulls from the reddest parts of Tarrant, Denton and Collin Counties. I'm not seeing this one without some significant mainstream media and corporate pressure and as a fan I can face the reality that this team doesn't have the history for anybody to have it firmly in its sights on a broader scale.

Correct.  A random Karen writing an article in the WaPo doesn't mean squat

[freyguy 4334]

change it to the Texas Nolan Ryans, or the Ventura Ass Beaters.