The president of San Francisco’s school board defiantly defended the district’s decision to strip 44 “racist” names from its schools without hearing from a single historian in a trainwreck new interview.
Gabriela López talked in circles as she was grilled by the New Yorker on the lack of history experts and on a report that found that the board’s controversial move was based, in part, on misinformation and “casual Google searches.”
Asked whether the move — the latest example of the burgeoning cancel culture movement — was “haphazard,” López replied, “No, because I’ve already shared with you that the people who have contributed to this process are also part of a community that is taking it as seriously as we would want them to.
“And they’re contributing through diverse perspectives and experiences that are often not included, and that we need to acknowledge.”
But one group that was absent from that “process” was actual historians, New Yorker reporter Isaac Chotiner pointed out.
López, 30, said it was “hard for me to answer” whether the advisory committee wanted them to testify, instead pointing to a previous statement that “they did not want to include historians.”
“I think that that’s not the process that they created,” she said, before trying to explain away the committee’s actions with more confusing doubletalk about “community members, people with a set of experiences” being behind the decision.
Late last month, the San Francisco board of education voted 6-1 to scrub names including George Washington, Abraham Lincoln and Paul Revere from its school buildings.
Longtime California Sen. Dianne Feinstein will have her named yanked from an elementary school because she replaced a Confederate flag that was removed by a protester when she was San Francisco mayor.
In a spreadsheet detailing the name changes, Washington is simply described as a “slaveowner, colonizer.”
The rationales behind several other name changes cite Wikipedia pages as the main source.
Robert Louis Stevenson Elementary will be a thing of the past because the famed “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” novelist from the 19th century penned a “cringeworthy poem” about “little frosty Eskimo” and “Japanee” children, the document says.
The schools have until April to propose new names, which will then be voted on by the board.
The district’s renaming plan has caused uproar in the community and beyond — even prompting a potential lawsuit — particularly over pulling Lincoln’s name because his “policies proved to be detrimental” to Native Americans.
López called the 16th president “not someone that I typically tend to admire or see as a hero, because of these specific instances where he has contributed to the pain of the decimation of people.”
She added, “That’s not something that I want to ignore. It’s something that I’m learning about and that I know it’s not often spoken about.”
The online spreadsheet cites a History.com article that misstates that Revere helmed the “disastrous Penobscot Expedition of 1779” that stripped land from the Penobscot Indians.
“This is connected to colonization,” the spreadsheet says.
The expedition, the History.com article says, was against British forces during the Revolutionary War.
But Revere got the boot from a K-8 school anyway. Chotiner noted that the 1779 event “was not actually about the colonization of Native American lands.”
“I see what you’re saying,” López replied. “So, for me, I guess it’s just the criteria was created to show if there were ties to these specific themes, right? White supremacy, racism, colonization, ties to slavery, the killing of indigenous people, or any symbols that embodied that. And the committee shared that these are the names that have these ties.”
The conversation grew heated when Chotiner pushed back, saying some of those “ties” were factually incorrect.
“So then you go into discrediting the work that they’re doing, and the process that they put together in order to create this list,” López shot back.
“So when we begin to have these conversations, and we’re pointing to that, and we’re given the reasoning and they’re sharing why they made this choice and why they’re putting it out there, I don’t want to get into a process where we then discredit the work that this group has done.”
The plan has also been panned by San Francisco Mayor London Breed, who criticized the board for moving forward with it despite not having one in place for reopening.
But López said board members were working on a reopening plan “every single day.”
The president attributed the controversy to people who have a problem with “the discussion of racism.”
“That is why I’m getting death threats,” she continued. “That is why people aren’t open to other possibilities. Because when we have this discussion, that’s the outcomes no matter how good it’s set up, no matter how open we are.”
