Ousting Ranger, SAC reckons with racist past

In a year of reckoning over the nation's roots in white supremacy, slavery and racial violence, one San Antonio institution confronted its own racist past and chose to be on the right side of history.

San Antonio College's landmark decision Wednesday, in a special session of its campus council, came in a unanimous vote to abandon its mascot, the Ranger.

When it was chosen in 1926, it honored the notorious Texas Rangers.

The council's recommendation was approved immediately by SAC president Robert Vela and became effective immediately. It ended the use of the mascot's name, symbol, logo and image.

Vela said an estimated 60 of 66 college council members heard from students, teachers and others, before members of the council addressed each another. The online session also reviewed the results of a survey on the mascot issue conducted earlier this year.

A majority supported dropping the mascot in the survey. Vela said a few students wanted to keep the mascot, “but it was more about the tradition, not about the issue of not understanding the past.”

In one voice SAC spoke against the almost century-old remnant of a racially violent period — when Texas Rangers roamed the borderlands carrying out lynching and brutality against Mexican, African and Native Americans with impunity.

Vela called the decision historic and spoke with a relief that was palpable.

“It was cleansing,” he said.

“This is a journey. There will be more things as we continue our diversity and inclusion work.”

He said SAC is “committed to doing the right thing.”

The movement to drop the mascot was more than a year in the making. It was started by a small group of Mexican American Studies students who'd learned the history of the Texas Rangers and began making presentations around campus and at academic gatherings. They produced a pamphlet about Texas Ranger history that was distributed around campus.

SAC'S decision joins a series of national moves confronting similar symbols of white supremacy and racial violence, including Confederate statutes erected in public spaces as part of a whitewashing of the Confederacy's adherence to human enslavement.

In a letter, Vela said, “Now we can begin the process of fashioning a new mascot identity that reflects the very best qualities of our SAC community.”

Vela said SAC will do a “landscape analysis” of the campus to identify other “remnants of systemic racism” and dive deeper into the data collected this year. He said SAC will look for more opportunities “to be more intentional in our diversity and inclusion.”

“We are on a journey,” he repeated.

Vela advised other institution's dealing with its own racist pasts to assemble diverse groups and identify “those components that still exist in our institutions that represent systemic racism.”

He also advised that such institutions have the courage to confront their pasts and research those ideas, symbols or behaviors that may be “embedded in our institutional norms.”

In a statement Wednesday, staff senate president Sabrina D. Macal-polasek said she supported the removal of the Ranger mascot and replacement with one that's “nonhuman, nonviolent and nonracist.”

Removing it “shows that we have respect for one another and that we are in the fight together — a fight to build a world that knows better, but most importantly does better,” she said.

Speaking for her colleagues, SAC faculty senate president Olivia Sandoval agreed it was time to remove the mascot, reaching into history to make her point.

“San Antonio College originally had a different name, University Junior College,” she read from a statement. “It was founded in 1925 under the administration of the University of Texas at Austin embodied by an education statute mandating racially segregated schools.

“It was under this environment that the Texas Ranger was selected as a mascot in 1926.”

As SAC prepares to celebrate its 95th anniversary later this year, it has one major task out of the way. It has made amends.

Only good can come from it.