The political correctness mob is now coming after professional baseball. This was on the horizon. When the lefty mob scalped the Washington Redskins, whose new name is unknown, this was bound to happen. If you give the Left an inch, they'll take several hundred miles. You cannot give an inch of land. The same applies to statues. This wasn't about Confederate statues, folks. Any person could see the long game here. The Confederacy was the flank march to move against the real target: The Founding Fathers. This nation's history is the target.
The Left wants to erase it—all of it. Any figure with a problematic past has to be wiped off the map. The "woke" ethos is unbearable. There's no nuance. By design, it's meant to wipe clean almost everything, to finally smear America as a racist country that has done untold harm to the world. And the Texas Rangers are part of that embodiment.
The op-ed in The Washington Post, written by Global Opinions editor Karen Attiah, declares the team name "must go" because of its sordid history:
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.
[…]
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.
First, no one has said this nation never had horrible and tragic periods of racial discrimination, hatred, and violence. And yet, we've progressed. A lot more work needs to be done, but this fetish with the Left and bringing up bad memories isn't meant to serve. It's meant to denigrate and force us into their sad and depressing view of America. And yet, people still want to come here for the very same reasons as an immigrant family who comes here the right way: opportunity. It's easy to become an American culturally. Our three major tenets are: work hard, defend what's yours, and love and protect your family. In fact, that's pretty universal among Western society. If this were the racist land of Mordor, then immigration wouldn't be such a topic of debate, wouldn't it? No one would be risking their lives to come here. There is still a right way and wrong way to enter this great country, but that's a separate debate.
The point is, you learn from history and not repeat it by talking about it and reminding one's society of its shortfalls but not by instituting a cultural ethos that prevents one from progressing because they're so obsessed with the very dark periods in 19th-century history. Changing a baseball team's name isn't going to erase the Texas Rangers. Also, you need to pick your battles. Do you go after real racists, maybe those running for office whose past remarks have been exposed or do you die on the hill that will certainly piss people off and make more folks roll their eyes—and rightfully so—by fighting to change a baseball team's name? No one goes to a Texas Rangers game and cares about being "woke." It's lunacy. And Rangers fans aren't aiding or abetting racism by attending these games. For the most part, these campaigns to change brand names have been led by white liberals. Yeah, of all people, white liberals are dictating what is and what isn't racist and doing so in the name of people of color. Case in point, no Native American cared that Washington's football team was called the "Redskins." This op-ed was written by a black woman, Attiah, who outlines reasons for the team's name change. Let's see if more black voices agree and if this will become a lightning rod for more white progressives to froth at the mouth, which has been the seat of irony regarding this Black Lives Matter resurgence in the activist orbit. It's being overtaken by white people. I've been told this is not kosher by some folks.
And look, some may take this as dismissive, but we can't simply rename everything. It's nonsensical. Seriously, by this standard, we'd have to rename New York City, or burn it to the ground, because it was named after King James II, then the Duke of York, who built a slave monopoly with his brother, Charles II. That's not going to happen, but by the Left's standards, it "must go." This campaign of erasure must stop, but I feel more businesses are inclined to cave to this PC mob.