San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Change can’t stop with names
Real progress will come when we quit ignoring others in pain
A few terrible names are gone, and more will go away soon.
That’s a good thing.
In some cases, young people made it happen, bringing change more quickly than anyone thought they could. In others, old people finally relented, after clinging to bad excuses for far too long.
That’s progress.
But it can’t stop with names, whether they’re tributes to Confederate soldiers on high school sports uniforms, or memorials to bigot professors on college buildings, or racial slurs on NFL company letterhead.
And for those who fear we’re losing our history?
It probably wouldn’t hurt to study the past of the places that allowed those names to thrive in the first place.
The Washington football team is a good example, because even during a week in which the franchise made the overdue decision to rid itself of a symbol of hostility and oppression, we found out we didn’t know the half of it.
Fifteen women who worked for the organization detailed years of alleged sexual harassment and threats of retaliation in a report released by the Washington Post on Thursday. As it turns out, a franchise that spent decades declaring that it did not care about those offended by its nickname also turned a blind eye to those suffering incomprehensible suffering in the workplace.
And while there obviously is not an applesto-apples comparison between a team’s choice of a mascot and its treatment of employees,
the common thread is a stunning lack of empathy and respect for fellow humans. That’s what so many of these fights boil down to, and it’s why it’s worthwhile to keep asking questions even after clearly objectionable names are scrapped.
Why, for instance, did we have to wait until the summer of 2020 for Hays High School to drop “Rebels” as a mascot, even though it was adopted as part of a Confederate motif during the civil rights movement and long had been the source of controversy?
According to Austin’s KVUE-TV, a survey of 1,152 students commissioned by the school showed that 59.4 percent had little-to-no comfort with the mascot, and that number rose to 71.9 percent among teachers and staff. When the school board voted unanimously to ditch “Rebels” on Thursday, it was a welcome step, but it also made one wonder:
Given the fact that so few of the people who walked the school’s halls could take pride in that name, what took so long? Why was “Dixie” still played as the fight song until 2015? Why were confederate flags still allowed on school property until 2012?
That’s a history worth analyzing, and so is the chapter unfolding on our state’s two biggest college campuses, with various degrees of resistance.
Years from now, scholars might look at the activism displayed by athletes at Texas and Texas A&M and have a few questions of their own.
They will recognize, almost certainly, that the players made things better. If not for the list of requests made by a large group of Longhorns on various university teams, UT still would not have a fitting tribute for Julius Whittier, the school’s first Black football letterman, and still would have a math building named for Robert Lee Moore, the professor who refused to allow Black students to take his classes even after desegregation.
But those scholars might also wonder why UT is designating an entrance named for activist Heman Sweatt at the front of a building still named for Theophilus Painter, the former university president who denied Sweatt admission to the UT law school and fought the case all the way to the Supreme Court, where Sweatt won.
They might also wonder why, at the school that delayed integration of its football program until the 1960s and fielded the country’s last all-white national championship team, they’re still being stubborn.
Even if few who’ve ever sung “The Eyes of Texas” were aware of its roots at a blackface minstrel show more than a century ago, its history is clearly problematic, and dismissing students’ legitimate complaints seems pointless. The same can be said of those at Texas A&M who criticize Aggies athletes for their opposition to the statue of former Confederate army general Sul Ross.
That statue might not come down this year, but it will someday. Eventually, when UT players keep walking off the field before “The Eyes of Texas,” that song will stop being played, too. We’ll also see the end of the Kansas City Chiefs, the Cleveland Indians, the Ole Miss Rebels, and more.
That, too, will be progress.
But it won’t be the only kind we need.