Last week, The New Yorker ran an interview with San Francisco school board President Gabriela López, a 30-year-old former teacher leading the district’s charge to bury American history. It’s eye-opening, to say the least.
López was elected on a campaign to cancel history. Under her leadership, the nation’s seventh-largest school district has spent its time not teaching its 57,000 students — who have been “learning” online for nearly a full year — but plotting to take the names of historic figures down from more than 40 district buildings. The names targeted for removal include Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Paul Revere, and Democrat U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein….
Some of the claims San Francisco’s school board have made about historical figures such as Revere and Lincoln to justify removing their names are simply false. New Yorker interviewer Isaac Chotiner asks López about that.
She replies: “So then you go into discrediting the work that they’re [the school board is] doing, and the process that they put together in order to create this list. So when we begin to have these conversations, and we’re pointing to that, and we’re given the reasoning and they’re sharing why they made this choice and why they’re putting it out there, I don’t want to get into a process where we then discredit the work that this group has done….
I know the committee is still meeting, and they’re still open to that [concerns about historical inaccuracy],” she expanded. “So it’s not that it’s not a concern. I think it’s something that’s missing without a dialogue…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.”
In other words, it doesn’t matter that Abraham Lincoln was the pivotal figure in freeing African-American slaves and that he intervened to save Native Americans from death. It matters that to the left he is a symbol of “white supremacy,” likely because of his commitment to the U.S. Constitution and the natural rights philosophy it expresses. It doesn’t matter if you free literal slaves if you do so while disagreeing with leftist ideology. Ideology is more important than reality….
The city of San Francisco recently sued the San Francisco Unified School District to try to get the schools open. San Francisco Mayor London Breed says “data show that Black, Latino, and Asian students, especially those who are low-income, have fared worse than white and wealthier students during the distanced learning.” The same is true worldwide.
The San Francisco schools Google document entry on why they hate Lincoln starts out: “Abraham Lincoln is not seen as much of a hero at all among many American Indian Nations and Native peoples of the United States.”
When Chotiner asks how she views Lincoln “generally,” López uses similar language: “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….”
The above comes from a Feb. 10 story in The Federalist.
The left is incompetent, ignorant, divisive, incapable of rational judgements and behavior and is doing the work of their father, satan.
Save yourselves from this perverse generation. -St. Peter (Acts 2:40)
Well said! These “Woke” people can’t see their hands in front of their faces and are heaped in sinful and perverse philosophies of hate. These people are pushing degenerate ideas and actions.
The country will not survive being run by people who truly hate it.
When Latinos are South of that border wall…they fight like fury get into the United States, because they realize they can improve their own lives, and the lives of their families, due to the freedom and opportunities in this country. Then, some finally achieve this goal, arrive, and start to have decent careers and lives. Some also have the decency to thank and support the US, in gratitude.
But many Latinos don’t seem to believe in being patriotic, or even being polite to Americans, for allowing them in.
Instead, they wave their national flags in our faces, support their own football teams when they play up here, and in general, feel they owe nothing to this country at all.
And then follows this constant complaining how they are victims of American racism, and how much they resent America and Americans.
So here’s a suggestion, Gabriela.
Will you please pack up, and return South to your Latino country of origin?
And if you are unwilling to do this, will you please shut up, and accept the fact that everyone, even Americans, can experience problems and difficulties in their lives? If you don’t like it here, please leave. And please understand that your behavior is rude, impolite, and lacking in ordinary politeness and gratitude.
If you can’t support this country, or even be polite to Americans, Go!! We don’t need your totally rude and bullying behavior.
Where is Kindness? Where is gratitude? Where is ordinary politeness? Not with Gabriela.
Totally agree. Along with the examples given you can add the wearing of t-shirts with the image of Che Guevara on it. She would probably approve of this as a classroom uniform.
Your message is so full of hate. Why do you fear the unknown instead of learning the beauty that immigrant populations have brought to this country? Let’s also eliminate St. Patrick’s Day and Columbus Day celebrations. Same thing, right?
No. We are speaking here of Gabriela’s hate, not ours
No one is asking you to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day, especially if what you mean by it are leprechauns, rainbows over pots of gold and excessive drinking bouts, which have absolutely nothing to do with St. Patrick. He was of British and Roman descent and had bed been enslaved himself by the Irish Druids. I really do not think he would like many of the things going on now in his name. Neither would St. Valentine, who died defending traditional Christian marriage against the Roman Pagans, who celebrated Lupercalia (now modern “Valentines” Day).
My point is that people can celebrate all those things in their own homes and churches, and keep it clean and wholesome for the children and adults. If they want shamrocks with leprechauns and children’s stories with good moral values, that is their own business, but all the wilder kinds of parties or suggestive advertisements do not honor the saints.
Notice how when we defend ourselves from these outrageous racist accusations, coming from people like Gabby, the Left immediately jumps into action, and cals us “Haters” and “Racists”. It is Gabriella making these racist remarks, Got IT!!! So Julieta, why didn’t you notice Gabriella’s remarks were racist? And why didn’t you address the “Hater” label to her? She has started this whole racist dialogue. She is responsible for the racist comments, from the beginning. Accusations like hers are very insulting. She needs to understand that, and so do you, Julieta.
Young Lopez and her ignorant, incompetent cohorts are a bunch of extremely immature, irrational, sick radical leftist liberals, not adult enough to sit on a school board and guide young children. A great danger to our society! Incompetent fools!
What do we call a person who brands and criminalizes another entire race of people?
The person who does this, is racist.
We are sick and tired of this stuff Gabriela
Not a boast, mind you, but I think I have pretty good facility with the English language and I once taught US history. I have no idea what this woman said, was trying to say, or wanted us to understand. If Lincoln isn’t recognized as an enabler of freedom for the American slave, who is?
I don’t care if you are a leftist or a rightist, facts make a difference. Lincoln has always been lifted up as a good man, who saved the Union. What more do they want him to be?
Not white.
Liberalism is a mental illness.
The lady is our West Coast version of AOC…… and I read the article twice and still don’t know what she said.
What Gabriela Lopez does not realize, or does not care to, is that Abraham Lincoln was against the war with Mexico because. rightly or wrongly, he thought it would extend slavery. His dealings with the northern indigenous tribes, I do not know, but I would think it depended on the tribe. The idea that all native indigenous people think alike is as racist as thinking all “white” people think alike. If she is against so-called “white privilege”, she need only look in a mirror as she is quite a few shades lighter than the man next to her. Her white European “slip” is showing.
Most people I know in San Francisco think this whole renaming thing, especially the extent it went, is utterly ridiculous. Citizens are incensed that the school board seems to spend more energy on this than on reopening schools. This is the kind of stuff that makes mainstream Dems go nuts.
There are no mainstream Democrats. That’s your problem. You think there’s a moderate element in the Democrat Party. There isn’t. If you truly are a moderate, you need to stop voting for Democrats because the Democrat Party is a radicalized ultra left, totalitarian, communist party. Maybe you’ll realize that you should start voting Republican in order to save the state and the country from woke insanity.
Ain’t that the truth. Democrats holding then-Democrat positions in the 1970s, 80s, 90s, and 2000s, even Bill and Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama before 2010, would be branded bigots and hatemongers in today’s Democrat party. The Democrat party is out of control.
You’re mostly right except the Republican party isn’t a safe haven from the woke anymore either. Democrats are hard left and Republicans are now soft/moderate/center left. Both parties are now left wing parties. I’m probably going to stop voting because the last election showed that it’s all rigged.
YFC,
The cancel culture and cancel free speech phenomenon that we’re currently witnessing has stark similarities to the McCarthyism of the 1950s. As you’ll recall, people lost their jobs and reputations back then by merely being accused of being Communists, regardless of the truth – very similar to today’s dynamic.
It’s my understanding that McCarthyism peaked and started to wane once the Republicans in the Senate censured Joseph McCarthy. We seem to be at a similar point in history. It seems that this craziness will only stop once the Democrats stand up to face down the destructive elements within their party.