Shortly after the NFL’s Washington Redskins and the MLB’s Cleveland Indians announced they’d be changing their team names, the Washington Post’s Global Opinions Editor demanded that the NFL’s Texas Rangers follow suit.
Karen Attiah claimed that the “team’s name is not so far off from being called the Texas Klansmen.”
Attiah added that, historically, the rangers—the law enforcement outfit that lent their name to the Dallas–Fort Worth-area baseball team—“were a cruel, racist force when it came to the nonwhites who inhabited the beautiful and untamed Texas territory.”
She said the group’s origin was linked to slavery—an increasingly ubiquitous trope among radical leftist groups who are pushing to defund police departments.
“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,” Attiah 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,” she continued.
“Ranger racism” spanned decades, Attiah claimed, and thus the team name is a reminder of how the Rangers were “called on to protect white supremacy,” or how they were “deployed to prevent school integration.”
To ignore this historical context is to participate in “revisionist history,” she claimed.
“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,” Attiah concluded.
Critics were quick to point out that this kind of thinking has no limitation or end goal:
However, there is at least one team unwilling to give in to leftist-driven “cancel culture.”
The Chicago Blackhawks announced last week that the hockey team would not be changing its name, a tribute to a real-life Native American.
“We celebrate Black Hawk’s legacy by offering ongoing reverent examples of Native American culture, traditions and contributions, providing a platform for genuine dialogue with local and national Native American groups,” the team added, according to CNN.
There is a “fine line between respect and disrespect,” but it is not wrong to honor the legacy of a nation or man as the Blackhawks have done, the team concluded.
