No more will school kids in San Francisco attend public schools named for such evil men as George Washington or Teddy Roosevelt. Even Abe Lincoln is unfit. Yesterday, the city board of education decided to rename 44 schools.
The board acted on the recommendation of a renaming committee. If a prominent American for whom a school is named did “just one thing” wrong, the committee decided, then the school would be renamed.
Undoubtedly, each of those for whom the schools were named did more than “just one thing” wrong. But one transgression on list of seven deadly sins was enough.
Oddly, the school board will not rename Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Academic Middle School, although he was, as The New American reported in 2019, an accessory to rape.
Names that Are Out
The renaming committee’s broad yet stringent criteria amounted to this: anyone committee leftists didn’t like.
A group called Families for San Francisco explained what was wrong with the process.
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FSF reported that the renaming committee did not consider the views of the “larger San Francisco community,” as it promised it would, and did not consult professional historians to help deliberations. Amusingly, the renaming committee chairman summarily dismissed historians as hindrance:
What would be the point? History is written and documented pretty well across the board. And so, we don’t need to belabor history in that regard. We’re not debating that. There’s no point in debating history in that regard. Either it happened or it didn’t.… And so, no need to bring historians forward to say — they either pontificate and list a bunch of reasons why, or [say] they had great qualities. Neither are necessary in this discussion.
Another problem, FSF noted, was the committee’s ridiculous standard. If the panel’s worthies, again, found “just one thing” they didn’t like about the school’s namesake, then the name had to go.
• Anyone directly involved in the colonization of people
• Slave owners or participants in enslavement
• Perpetuators of genocide or slavery
• Those who exploit workers/people
• Those who directly oppressed or abused women, children, queer, or transgender people
• Those connected to any human rights or environmental abuses
• Those who are known racists and/or white supremacists and/or espoused racist beliefs
But the “just one thing” rule, FSF observed, “assumes the conclusion.”
George Washington is an example:
It has never been a secret that Washington owned slaves. However, as we fully embrace the self-evident truth that Black lives matter as much as all other lives, we struggle to reassess Washington’s historical legacy. Similar considerations apply to his role as a colonizer. Some people believe these flaws are so great that we should no longer honor him. Other people believe his virtues as a hero and a leader are so great that we should continue to honor him, even as we acknowledge his flaws. This is a difficult debate, whose resolution requires the sustained discussion with the larger community called for by the original resolution. Defining the criteria as a “Just One Thing” test effectively assumes the conclusion at the outset and circumvents the needed discussion. Without the sustained discussion with the community, the result is more likely to be division than enlightenment.
And the committee applied the rule arbitrarily. The committee did not objectively evaluate the historical figures accused of “espousing racist beliefs,” for instance, but instead subjectively — and rashly — judged them.
Result: The committee discussed Abraham Lincoln for five seconds and George Washington for 12 before tossing them. Yet the committee mulled Malcolm X for 10 minutes before deciding his name should stay.
Even though he confessed that he was a pimp and abused women, “his life was about undoing that work and redressing that work, and he did his fair share of reparations around that work,” the committee chairman claimed.
But Washington’s work, FSF explained of the committee’s decisions, “was not similarly restorative to the harm done to the Indigenous People of America.”
Others on the leftist hit list are Vasco Núñez de Balboa, Herbert Hoover, Thomas Jefferson, Junípero Serra, and Robert Louis Stevenson. Amusingly, Senator Dianne Feinstein’s name will no longer grace a school either. She sinned almost 40 years ago, when she was mayor, by replacing a vandalized Confederate flag that was part of a display at city hall.
The Big Virtue Signal will cost taxpayers $440,000.
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No Discussion of King
The committee’s laughable work did not, of course, include the nation’s most revered secular saint, Martin Luther King, Jr., even though he “directly oppressed or abused women.”
Biographer David Garrow divulged FBI documents that showed the binge-drinking King’s numerous adulterous affairs and “looked on, laughed and offered advice” as a fellow “minister” raped a woman. He was also partial to orgies, and also attacked a woman.
