4 ms·
SF board halts process to rename Washington, Lincoln and Feinstein schools
- Digory 6y ago>figures with disputed historical relevance No serious person debates whether Washington was relevant to national history. We're debating whether good people today can praise the achievements of a person who held Washington's immoral views in the 1700s, without harming others.
- mansion7 6y agoA fair question would be: are other countries seriously considering erasing our historical heroes using judgments arrived at by modern day critical race/social justice theories, or just America? And why should USA be held to a different, more extreme standard than, say, India, China, Russia, Italy, Peru, Ecuador, Belize, etc?
- frellus 6y agoWoke political correctness gone wrong. Nothing about getting kids back to school, until just recently -- but all about virtual signaling by the school board. Glad they put aside this issue, but even on the face of it's seems insane to me.
- ipnon 6y agoMaybe we should ask what is the point of naming a school? Why do we name schools after people? Is it to glorify the named in question? Or to give the students a hero to aspire towards?
- Daho0n 6y agoNaming things like this is very American so not much of a surprise.
- frongpik 6y agoWoke lunatics. They called Lincoln a person of questionable historical importance who encumbered rights of oppressed minorities.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- bruceb 6y agoActually surprised the naming rights are not sold. Especially in the bay area, no shortage of wealthy people and companies. People already do it for colleges.
- refurb 6y agoAs a resident of SF, you have to wonder how much of this kind of crap happens behind closed doors - elected representatives spending time on crap that doesn’t matter. Then suddenly you understand why SF has one of the highest city+county budgets per capita yet horrible services, decaying infrastructure and rampant corruption.
- true_religion 6y agoSo, I get that then argument against Washington is that he was a man who kept slaves during a time when half of the US had already begun its abolishment, and most of Europe had banned the importation of slaves and was moving towards total abolishment. In his case, he could have done the moral thing. He simply chose not to because he wanted to maintain the wealth that owning slaves brought him. One could certainly say that he does not represent current social mores, or even past ones. However argument against Lincoln is that he signed various acts like the Pacific Railway Act of 1862 which took land away from the tribes that previously held it. Obviously the tribes which are now mere protectorates of the US would rather be independent nations... but unlike with slavery, this course of history isn’t one that people generally support reversing. We could generally give back land to the Native American nations. They continue to exist in the present day. However if we won’t do that, then changing a name of a school is just paying lip service to their views. If what Lincoln did is an injustice then it is one that is ongoing and perpetrated by the existing US Government, and all the politicians we elect.