Renaming game is a distraction
Wherever a monument to the Confederacy meets a deserved demise, its defenders can be counted on to warn that this is the top of a slippery slope toward a wholesale cleansing of every trace of our history based on the sensitivities of 21stcentury leftists. It’s a specious, disingenuous argument, but the San Francisco school board is doing its best to prove it right.
Wresting its attention away from such trivial distractions as the fact that its schools aren’t open, the board chose this moment to urge 44 of them to think up new names. It seems the San Francisco School Names Advisory Committee found more than a third of the city’s schools to be named after people and places that don’t meet its exacting criteria for the honor.
The committee scrutinized every school’s eponym for any association with genocide, slavery, colonialism, exploitation, oppression, racism or environmental degradation. The result, pending ratification by the board, is a dizzying compendium of what the district deems unacceptable.
Nearly every American president lending his name to a school is threatened with the board’s big eraser: Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, Lincoln, Garfield, Teddy Roosevelt, McKinley and Hoover. Oddly, only Grover Cleveland is spared.
Historical figures, at least those between the Renaissance and World War II, fared poorly in general, from the statesman Daniel Webster to the inventor Thomas Edison. The committee seems to have approved of few other than St. Francis himself and Galileo, who will remain attached to the Academy of Science and Technology despite his offenses to Ptolemaic astronomers.
Some forbidden names belong to towering figures with substantial sins: Washington and Lincoln are our foremost forefathers, but the former owned slaves and the latter perpetuated brutality toward Native Americans. George Washington High School’s stationery may therefore face the same fate as the boardcensored mural within.
Others face cancellation for relative obscurities: Revolutionary War hero Paul Revere for his involvement in a battle tenuously linked to the colonization of the Penobscot tribe; Edward Hyde, the first earl of Clarendon, over his 17thcentury impeachment by the English House of Commons.
Being current was no guarantee of safety either. Though one modern exmayor, Willie Brown, dodged a reckoning, another, Dianne Feinstein, did not. Remarkably, the senator’s cited offense — a 1986 controversy involving a City Hall display of historical flags that included the Confederacy’s — was unrelated to her embrace of Sen. Lindsey Graham.
Under the circumstances, the best defense might be not to be named for a person at all. And yet schools known after neighborhoods and features such as the Mission and the Presidio are targeted for links to Spanish colonialism. It’s enough to justify a Chronicle letter writer’s recommendation that the district dispense with names altogether and go with numbers.
Contrary to Confederate apologists and the school board, it is possible to distinguish between ending the lionization of those who fought for racism and oppression, which we should, and scrubbing every name and place of the dark aspects of our history regardless of contribution or context, which we shouldn’t.
Mayor London Breed noted Friday that amid a pandemic that has closed schools for months, “to hear that the district is focusing energy and resources on renaming schools — schools that they haven’t even opened — is offensive.” The board’s symbolic assaults on historic wrongs are indeed an unhelpful diversion from the hard work of curing current inequalities with functioning public schools.