An editor at the Washington Post is calling for the Texas Rangers to rename their Major League Baseball team.
“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,” Karen Attiah, a global opinions editor at the Washington Post, wrote in an op-ed published Monday.
Attiah, who grew up in Dallas, said she was raised on “myths about Texas Rangers as brave and wholesome guardians of the Texas frontier.”
“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,” she wrote.
The Texas Ranger Division is an agency “within the Texas Department of Public Safety with lead criminal investigative responsibility” over cases such as unsolved crimes and public corruption, according to the state police website.
Attiah noted the first job of the rangers, which was formed in 1835, “was to clear the land of Indian[s] for white settlers.”
“That was just the start,” she said. “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.”
Citing a new book about the rangers by Doug Swanson, Attiah quoted the journalist as writing that the job of the rangers in the force’s early days “was to seize and hold Texas for the white man.”
In the weeks since George Floyd’s death, a renewed conversation about police brutality and systemic racism has been ignited. On Monday, the Washington Redskins announced they will retire the team name and logo after years of pleas to do so.
Some activists in Texas have pointed to the Rangers’ name as an example of white supremacy.
“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 to the Dallas Morning News. “The Texas Rangers Baseball Club stands for equality. We condemn racism, bigotry and discrimination in all forms.”
Attiah said she hopes the team is willing to prove it’s serious about being more inclusive.
“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,” she wrote. “The Texas Rangers’ team name must go.”
