I started this rural-urban comparison of recent local government recalls in California last week, and this post is going to focus on the urban bit--what happened in San Francisco on February 15, when more than 70% of voters supported the recall of three members of the city's Board of Education (only three were eligible for recall based on how long they had served).
I'll leave for a future post more details about what happened a few weeks earlier in Shasta County, California, popularly thought of as rural, though it's a metropolitan county. San Francisco, however, is the Golden state's most densely populated county, and it is coterminous with San Francisco City.
Public ire toward the San Francisco school board originated last year, in January, 2021, when the board voted 6-1 a year ago, in January, 2021, to rename 44 schools currently named for folks like Paul Revere, Diane Feinstein, George Washington, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Abraham Lincoln. Ross Douthat, New York Times columnist, wrote then:
After the vote, I spent some time reading the Google spreadsheet helpfully compiled by the renaming effort, which listed the justification for each erasure: for Washington, slave-owning; for Revere, helping to command a doomed Revolutionary War military operation on the Maine coast that nonetheless supposedly contributed to the “colonization” of the Penobscot tribe; for Stevenson, writing a “cringeworthy poem” that includes words like “Eskimo” and “Japanee.” (It may not surprise you that some of these justifications, often pulled from Wikipedia, included significant errors of historical fact.)
As interesting as the spreadsheet, in its way, was the displeased statement from San Francisco’s mayor, London Breed. Though there was liberal opposition to the renaming project, the pressures of the mayor’s position apparently made it impossible for her to argue straightforwardly that Abraham Lincoln still deserves to have a school named after him. Instead, her ire focused on the fact that the school board is busy renaming schools when it hasn’t actually found a way to open them: “What I cannot understand is why the School Board is advancing a plan to have all these schools renamed by April, when there isn’t a plan to have our kids back in the classroom by then.”
After that, the school board also decided to do away with "merit-based" admissions at the city's prestigious Lowell High School, a magnet school that Laurel Rosenhall of the Los Angeles Times described thusly:
Lowell High School historically has admitted only students with strong grades and test scores, a policy that’s been controversial since before I was a student there in the 1990s. Though the campus has been an engine of upward mobility for generations of students from immigrant families, Black and Latino students have long been underrepresented. Overrepresented are the number of California politicians with ties to the school: Both parents of former Gov. Jerry Brown graduated from Lowell High, as did Gov. Gavin Newsom’s mother. State Controller Betty Yee graduated from Lowell in 1975, and Lt. Gov. Eleni Kounalakis is married to a Lowell alum, according to my alumni newsletter, which writes about such things.
Soon after the election results rolled in, showing overwhelming voter support for the recall, columnist Mark Z. Barabak wrote in the Los Angeles Times:
The circumstances of the recall were both unique and broadly reflective.
In a place that prides itself on social justice and forward thinking, members of the school board outdid themselves by moving to strip the names of, among others, Presidents Washington and Lincoln and Sen. Dianne Feinstein from 44 public schools.
The intent was to remediate the country’s history of injustices: George Washington owned slaves, Abraham Lincoln oversaw the slaughter of Native Americans, and Feinstein, as mayor in 1984, replaced a Confederate flag that had been vandalized at City Hall with a new one. The result was outrage.
In another instance of misplaced priorities, board members spent hours debating whether a father who was white and gay brought sufficient diversity to a parental advisory committee. His appointment was ultimately nixed, but there was no recovering the time that was wasted.
Perhaps most antagonizing, the board moved to end merit-based admissions to Lowell High School, one of the city’s most sacred institutions, where Asian American students are the majority. (The move catalyzed the district’s Asian American community, long an important force in San Francisco politics.)
Old comments surfaced from Collins, in which she stated Asian Americans used “white supremacist” thinking to get ahead and were racist toward Black students. She apologized, then sued the school district and five fellow board members, seeking $87 million in damages, for removing her title as vice president. A judge summarily rejected the case.
This is the only account I have seen detail why the board would move to rename a school named for U.S. Senator Diane Feinstein. Other coverage of how Abraham Lincoln, for example, could be one of the bad guys is here.
Laurel Rosenhall suggests on the Los Angeles Times editorial page that the overwhelming success of the recall was less due to a failure on the part of the board to "do its job." Rosenhall closes her column thusly:
In the end, all that misdirected effort accomplished little. A judge ruled that the board couldn’t change the Lowell admissions policy because it had violated open-meeting laws. The board rescinded its plan to rename dozens of campuses after being ridiculed at home and across the nation.
But the parents who spent hours on Zoom trying to get the board to listen to them and their children had been awakened. Their recall movement plowed ahead, gaining support from progressives and moderates in a city where Dem-on-Dem combat is usually fierce. This wasn’t about a conservative backlash. It was just about a school board that didn’t do its job.
On the wokeness front, I found of particular interest the San Francisco Chronicle's coverage of some comments by recalled school board member Allison Collins:
Lowell [High School] wasn’t the main issue for [Laurence Lee, a 2011 alum of Lowell], but rather the “overt racism” of Collins’ 2016 tweet comparing Asians to a racial slur against Black people after she said they weren’t standing up against then-President-elect Donald Trump. She deleted the tweet after being reported, but reposted in a screenshot in December 2021.
“It’s completely performative, outrageous crap,” Lee said. “We used to have support and allies. Now we’re the easy scapegoat.”
Collins also said in 2016 that many Asian American students, teachers and parents “use white supremacist thinking to assimilate ‘get ahead.’”
A few days before the election, she doubled down.
“So when I have said in the past that SOME members of the AAPI community have aligned themselves with whiteness, it’s a historical fact, not an opinion. It’s surprising to me that some folks still find this idea so controversial,” she wrote in a tweet. “And let me add, this is true of ALL GROUPS including Black folks.”
This argument that Asians are trying to be white or acting white is also one made in Claudia Rankine's book, Just Us.
So, the right-leaning and many mainstream media frame this successful recall as a backlash against wokeness, but there's room to interpret it the way Rosenhall does, too. In fact, this quote from one of the recall organizer, Autumn Looijen, is perhaps most accurate in that it gets at the intersection of issues:
It’s not about renaming, itself. It’s about renaming while the house is on fire.
Meanwhile, a recall effort is afoot to remove Chesa Boudin, the progressive prosecutor in San Francisco.
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