The Crazy Interview with SF School Board President on How San Francisco Renamed its Schools
‘Lincoln is not someone that I typically tend to admire or see as a hero’
By Katy Grimes, February 8, 2021 7:38 am
The San Francisco Unified School District, “is planning to rename a school named after Abraham Lincoln because the former president did not demonstrate that ‘black lives mattered to him,” the Globe reported in December. “President Abraham Lincoln, considered one of the greatest U.S. Presidents in the country’s history, only abolished slavery in 1863 with the Emancipation Proclamation.”
In late January, the San Francisco School Board voted 6-1 to rename 44 schools around the city over “racist” namesakes, of historical figures in U.S. history from George Washington to Abraham Lincoln to Paul Revere to U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein, the Globe reported. The school board claimed the change was needed due to calls from a small minority of people in the city who believed the namesakes were “slave owners, had a part in slavery and genocide, were part of human rights violations, or were known racists or white supremacists.”
Has California landed on Planet Stupid?
The Globe reported within days the outrage over the Board’s strange decision to rename the schools ballooned. To no one’s surprise, a petition was launched almost immediately and exploded in popularity, gathering 10,000 signatures within hours.
Then is was reported that the school board was considering the Grateful Dead’s frontman and lead guitarist Jerry Garcia for a school renaming.
Just when it appeared the San Francisco School Board could not be more out of touch, New Yorker magazine published the strangest interview with Gabriela López, 30, the head of the San Francisco Board of Education, about the decision to rename the 44 public schools.
The New Yorker’s Isaac Chotiner asked several questions of Lopez, and it became evident quickly that Chotiner found her answers vacuous and shallow.
I read that you stated, “This in no way erases our history. It cannot, and we will not forget the past. But we can honor the work that has been done to dismantle racism and white-supremacy culture.” Can you explain what you meant by that?
Lopez: “There’s this idea that because we’re removing the names we’re somehow removing the stories in what we’re learning, and that in fact is not the case. It’s really just sharing in our schools what is and isn’t uplifted. And that’s part of my work as a school-board member. That’s been my work as a teacher. What are we highlighting in our classes? And what are we teaching our students? And what isn’t being uplifted in our time and our public-school system that we’ve seen throughout history?”
Lopez, who has been a teacher of Spanish Immersion for 4 years, attended California State University, Dominguez Hills, and majored in Liberal Studies and Women’s Studies, and went on to UCLA where she received a Masters of Education.
Is what you’re saying that in practice we don’t necessarily want to uplift, say, Lincoln, but that doesn’t mean we won’t teach the Civil War or the Emancipation Proclamation?
Lopez” Absolutely. But, even with that, it’s talking about the brutality and the truth that is often not discussed in our classrooms. And I’m thinking even to my own experience and my own learning, all that I got through my college experiences, that we gain through ethnic studies, is not a process that we normally see in our school career. And so it is discussing the history. Of course, that’s not going anywhere.
He asks her about the importance of learning of history, and why the committee didn’t want historians to testify:
Lopez: After explaining that instead of historians, they “included a diverse set of community members, people with a set of experiences that contribute to these discussions, people from different backgrounds who are also educated in their own rights,” she fully explains what is wrong with history: “My work is in sharing with students this understanding of our history. I think that for me, it’s important to uplift. This does not cancel history. It’s a moment and an opportunity to uplift things that we normally aren’t uplifting in our public-school system, in our society. And that means other voices, other experiences of diverse community members that would bring pride to our student body, and that would allow for students to learn more about themselves. It’s really moving away from this idea that somehow in the taking away of these names, we’re also taking away the stories, and we’re taking away what happened. We can’t move on without that understanding. We can’t heal as a society without that understanding.”
Chotiner challenges the historical inaccuracy of some of the committee’s decisions:
…some of the historical reasoning behind these decisions has been contested—not so much how we should view the fact that George Washington was a founder of the country and a slave holder but, rather, factual things like Paul Revere’s name being removed for the Penobscot Expedition, which was not actually about the colonization of Native American lands. And so there were questions about whether historians should have been involved to check these things.
This is Lopez’s answer: “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. And so, for me, at this moment, I have the understanding we have to do the teaching, but also I do agree that we shouldn’t have these ties, and this is a way of showing it.”
That is the answer about historical accuracy from the President of the San Francisco Board of Education. It gets worse.
But it seems like we should have some sense of whether what they did was historically correct or not. No?
I’m open for that conversation.
O.K. Well, I just mentioned the Paul Revere thing. I know there was a question about James Russell Lowell and whether he wanted Black people to vote, which he was actually in favor of. The name of this businessman, James Lick, was ordered removed because his foundation funded an installation that didn’t go up until almost two decades after he died.
Right, I see what you mean.
But that’s not something you’re concerned about?
No. I mean, I wouldn’t phrase it that way, either. I think it would just require more dialogue.
When Chotiner says more accuracy in history is needed, Lopez replies:
So here’s my piece. The real issue is how we are challenged when we talk about racism. And how then the masses come out in order to combat this, when it’s an idea that harms what we’re used to. My current situation is sharing with people very simply that I don’t think it’s appropriate to have symbols of racism and white-supremacy culture. And we’re trying to have this discussion, and what I’ve seen throughout my time on the board, whenever issues like this come out or arise, people need to combat it and try to find any problems around what we’re discussing, because it’s not something that we should be open to having a discussion about. It’s something that people have a lot of issues with.
He challenges Lopez about the historical errors: So none of the errors that I read to you about previous entries made you worried that maybe this was done in a slightly haphazard way?
I’m not quite sure what that means when we are talking about things that did or didn’t happen.
I think what you’re pointing to and what I keep hearing is you’re trying to undermine the work that has been done through this process. And I’m moving away from the idea that it was haphazard.
It gets worse.
Chotiner notes that a lot of the commentary about the school names is focussed specifically on Lincoln, and then asks Lopez her thoughts about how Lincoln should be viewed.
Lopez: I think that the killing of indigenous peoples and that record is something that is not acknowledged. It’s something that people are now learning about, and due to this process. And so we just have to do the work of that extra learning when we’re having these discussions.
And then she adds, “I think Lincoln gets more praise than the . . . how can I say this? Yeah. I don’t know. I don’t think that . . . Lincoln is 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—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.”
“Vacuous” and “ignorant” does not begin to describe the President of the San Francisco Board of Education. How did this happen?
Her bio answers that question: “Outside of the classroom, López is a core organizer at Teachers 4 Social Justice.”
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Top of the list for totalitarianism is to erase actual history of a nation and then re-write it to justify their control.
I think her major in college was “Word Salad-ology” with a minor in “Brainless Studies” and if her mentor turns out to be Mr. Nonsense-Talk himself, Gavin Newsom, I wouldn’t be surprised. She’s a one-woman wrecking ball for that last shred of good reputation California had. Wow.
Yikes, absolutely love your observation, Show and Tell!
So what exactly does a current UCLA masters degree buy us?
She might be qualified to be Newsom’s speech writer????
HA!
They are so wrapped up in their power grab they don’t realize WE see what they are up to now…”If ever” we get voting secured we won’t have these types of mentally deranged nuts in power. Pray that the election is overturned and Trump is back in office soon. If not then this nation is over and we need to rise up….
Wow, Liz. Get into reality and start fighting this insidious agenda in your community. Local school boards, city councils, Drag Queen Story Time at your local library. Trump isn’t coming to save you or any of us.
Planet Stupid is right Katy! Is Garcia “High” School a joke? Tie dye dress code and free gummy bear edibles for all students!!
Nuke san fran. Only way to cleanse it
“I think what you’re pointing to and what I keep hearing is you’re trying to undermine the work that has been done through this process. And I’m moving away from the idea that it was haphazard.” said, Lopez.
What I am reading is that we need as an educated society need to do is to move away from electing young Social Justice Warriors, such as Lopez to lead the way, in modern day “enlightenment”. It would be hilarious ONLY if she was very far away from influencing our children and deconstructing our educational institutions!
Like ya, know, like…..
Facts do matter!
Katy, thank you for enlightening the public to the woke mentality that challenges us.
Perhaps it would be better that Lincoln was never president? Answer that MS. Lopez I DARE YOU.
Can you imagine all those lucrative signage contracts to the Building Trades Council? The printers get new stationary. The bus system has to create new maps, etc. etc.
Trust me, this is all about San Francisco Pay-To-Play and lucrative contracts. They’ve got a $1Billion dollar Prop 39 bond program that has turned their pay-to-playgrounds into the Winchester Mystery House of landscape architecture all in the name of “green schoolyards.” They build a building, then tear it down, then put it back up again over and over.
Any sincere critical examination of significant persons must be in historical context. Presidents Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln to name a few were truly great men of their time. Individuals such as, Gabriela López, expose their disdain for our Country simply because she can only interrupt the world through a racial lens. Quite a sad individual.
Has California landed on Planet Stupid?
This woman is prima facie evidence that the answer is unreservedly YES!!!
I’ve never heard or seen someone use the word uplift as frequently OR INCORRECTLY as many times…
A 30 year old functional idiot….
Can you imagine the country these pathetic ethnomasochists would live in today if Abraham Lincoln had failed?
I have a BA and MA in history. This erasing of it is appalling but not surprising. In the late 1990s, I spent one semester in a teaching credential program and a state university in CA. Despite my MA in history, I was still required to take additional classes in ethnic studies and women’s history because my focus on California history and the US Civil War was not good enough. I dropped out after they were pushing the idea that you should let kids sleep in class because it might be the only safe place they had. . . That was almost 30 years ago. It has obviously gotten much worse.
Yes Surprised, it has gotten worse. Now those kids are safely sleeping in Newsoms billion dollar COVID-19 testing lab…….
Here we have a president of the SF School Board who doesn’t know enough US History to realize that if President Lincoln had FAILED to keep the Union intact, the Confederacy would have become it’s own nation. With that, slavery, racism, hate and prejudice would have become the norm, today. Where would that have left immigrants from Mexico, like the parents of Ms. Lopez? The woman is clueless and unqualified. She should resign from the SFUSD, while her recall petition gathers momentum necessary to make it happen.