General Discussion
Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsSan Francisco's move to rename schools will provide invaluable ammunition to Fox News.
The Five-Second Cancellation of Abraham Lincoln
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/02/san-francisco-renaming-spree/617894/
San Francisco has issued its latest grand moral decree, and bad ex-presidents would be quaking in their coffinsif they could stop laughing. On January 26, the San Francisco school board announced that dozens of public schools must be renamed. The figures that do not meet the boards standards include Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, John Muir, Robert Louis Stevenson, Paul Revere, and Dianne Feinstein. A panel had determined that the 44 schoolsmore than one-third of the citys totalwere named after figures guilty of being, variously, colonizers; slave owners; exploiters of workers; oppressors of women, children, or queer and transgender people; people connected to human rights or environmental abuses; and espousers of racist beliefs. This holier-than-thou crusade is typical for San Francisco, which in recent years has traded in its Freak Flag to march under the banner of brain-dead political correctness. Aside from providing invaluable ammunition to Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, and the more than 70 million Trump supporters whose most extreme caricatures of liberals have now been confirmed, renaming the schools is likely to cost the already deeply indebted district millions of dollars, and will not help a single disadvantaged student or actually advance the cause of racial justice.
The nations reckoning about its racist past might have positive aspects, but exercises in Maoist constructive self-criticism are not among them. The School Names Advisory Committee was created in 2018 by the San Francisco Board of Education. Although the committee of community members and school-board staff was supposed to engage the larger San Francisco community in a sustained discussion regarding public school names, no such engagement ever took place. The blue-ribbon panel did its own research (using that term lightly) and issued its own rulings. In keeping with the incorruptible, Robespierre-like spirit of our revolutionary times, the committee decreed that one sin (being a colonizer or slave owner, using an inappropriate word, and so on) was all that was required to send a figure to the guillotine. Once that decision was made, the severed heads rolled into the gutter of history. Since Washington was a slave owner and, in the words of the committee, the majority of [Lincolns] policies proved detrimental to native peoples, the leader who won Americas war of independence and the one who saved the union and issued the Emancipation Proclamation were dispatched without further discussion. The decision to rename Abraham Lincoln High took five seconds; George Washington took 12.
The decision process was a joke. The committees research seems to have consisted mostly of cursory Google searches, and the sources cited were primarily Wikipedia entries or similar. Historians were not consulted. Embarrassing errors of interpretation were made, as well as rudimentary factual errors. Robert Louis Stevenson, perhaps the most beloved literary figure in the citys history, was cancelled because in a poem titled Foreign Children in his famous collection A Childs Garden of Verses, he used the rhyming word Japanee for Japanese. Paul Revere Elementary School ended up on the renaming list because, during the discussion, a committee member misread a History.com article as claiming that Revere had taken part in an expedition that stole the lands of the Penobscot Indians. In fact, the article described Reveres role in the Penobscot Expedition, a disastrous American military campaign against the British during the Revolutionary War. (That expedition was named after a bay in Maine.) But no one bothered to check, the committee voted to rename the school, and by order of the San Francisco school board Paul Revere will now ride into oblivion. The committee also failed to consistently apply its one-strike-and-youre-out rule. When one member questioned whether Malcolm X Academy should be renamed in light of the fact that Malcolm was once a pimp, and therefore subjugated women, the committee decided that his later career redeemed his earlier missteps.
Yet no such exceptions were made for Lincoln, Jefferson, and others on the list. In its rush to sweep historical evildoers off the stage, the committee erased much of San Francisco and Californias Hispanic heritage. Not just Father Junípero Serra, the spiritual head of Spains colonizing expedition, but also José Ortega, who as a member of the Portolá expedition discovered San Francisco Bay, and other other Spanish- and Mexican-era figures, had their names removed from schools because they engaged in or were associated with actions that harmed Native Americans. No one disputes that every colonizing group in California, from the Spanish to the Mexicans to the Americans (who engaged in actual genocide), had a dreadful record with native peoples. But for all of its supposed ethnic sensitivity, the committee seems not to have been concerned about removing Latin figures. Mythical entities also fell under the fatal gaze of the Purity Police. El Dorado Elementary, named after a fantastical kingdom whose fame circulated among Spanish explorers in the early 16th century and whose Goldfinger-like ruler was allegedly ceremonially covered by his subjects with gold dust, also made the list. Citing the death of native peoples that resulted from the Gold Rush, the San Francisco Chronicle reported that a committee member said, I dont think the concept of greed and lust for gold is a concept we want our children to be givenan idealistic, if possibly futile, position in a city whose median household income exceeds $100,000.
snip
kas125
(2,472 posts)Um, no. I don't care what they'll say and I don't know why I have to read about it here.
Celerity
(43,497 posts)Hermit-The-Prog
(33,413 posts)Extremism comes in many forms.
Celerity
(43,497 posts)SunSeeker
(51,679 posts)VarryOn
(2,343 posts)Just think...how many Washington Counties are there? What about Jefferson County? There are many counties in the South named in honor Confederate heros, and I doubt every Union honoree would pass muster either. And I'd venture a guess that every state has counties and cities named after founding fathers, many of whom were slave owners.
Then think about how many places have religious-affiliated names...San, which means 'saint', is in tons of names. Pick any name in the Bible, and there's probably some place named after it.
Any place named after a person will, no doubt, be researched at some point. I would expect most will not pass the test. I live in Benton County, and I took a few minutes to research who it was named after. I learned it was named to honor five-term Missouri (not Arkansas????) Senator Thomas Hart Benton. In the first four paragraphs of his Wikipedia page, I learned he was an aide to Andrew Jackson and owned slaves. The first fact alone would likely doom him to the trash heap, but fact two makes it certain.
Places should be renamed using things like animals, flowers, astronomical bodies, or maybe elements from the periodic table. San Diego could become Daffodil, California; Washington state could be named Supernova, and my home county could become Whitetail County (we have lots here!).
To the San Francisco school board, which has a lot of schools to rename, they should just go old school and use numbers--Public School 17, High School 3, etc.
Celerity
(43,497 posts)VarryOn
(2,343 posts)iemitsu
(3,888 posts)to honor a more diverse group of people in naming the public schools. Then these school names could be replaced with more community celebration.