The San Francisco Unified School District has finalized its list of 44 historical figures who will soon have their names scrubbed off the city’s schools in an effort to make sure that absolutely no one is offended at any time within the district’s boundaries. After paying untold dollars on a panel of experts who spent months combing through school names in an effort to find “problematic” tributes to those impossible not-woke figures in our history, the district is ready to stop taking prisoners and start taking names…down.
Starting with Abraham Lincoln!
The Daily Mail explains:
“The history of Lincoln and Native Americans is complicated, not nearly as well known as that of the Civil War and slavery,” Jeremiah Jeffries, chairman of the renaming committee and a first grade teacher, told the San Francisco Chronicle. “Lincoln, like the presidents before him and most after, did not show through policy or rhetoric that black lives ever mattered to them outside of human capital and as casualties of wealth building.”
Jeffries said the committee decided on the renaming once they discussed Lincoln’s treatment of Native Americans, and that the positive parts of his record cannot discount the negatives.
“The discussion for Lincoln centered around his treatment of First Nation peoples, because that was offered first,” he said. “Once he met criteria in that way, we did not belabor the point.”
The move has become the source of some debate, however, as – to many – Lincoln is one of the greatest presidents America has seen with his leadership during the Civil War and abolition of slavery a critical and progressive moment in the move toward racial equality across the nation.Â
Oh, thanks for including that last paragraph, because one might have walked away from the story thinking that Lincoln was a terrible wretch who devoted his presidency to destroying Native Americans and…pretty much nothing else. But yeah, now that we think about it, he did do SOME good. Freeing the slaves isn’t everything, of course, but gee, you’d think it would be enough to put the man’s name on a school.
Guess not.
Other names soon to be stripped from San Francisco schools include: George Washington, Herbert Hoover, Dianne Feinstein, and Thomas Edison.
No word yet on how many of these schools will be renamed after George Floyd, but we have to imagine the answer isn’t zero.
Comments are closed.