It’s easy to become disheartened these days about America's out-of-control cancel culture, which is gathering momentum and to which there seems no end in sight. This week, however, brought news of at least one small victory for common sense and our shared culture. It came, moreover, in the leftist fever swamp of San Francisco, of all places.
After severe backlash, the San Francisco Board of Education backed away from its decision to rename 44 schools. In January, a committee voted to wipe away the names of anyone who, in its opinion, helped perpetuate slavery, racism, colonization, and white supremacy. The historical figures mown down by the broad sweep of the cancellation scythe included George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Paul Revere, Robert Louis Stevenson, John Muir, and a contemporary entrant, Dianne Feinstein, the Democratic senator.
Even liberals fiercely criticized the decisions. Not only was it absurdly broad and sweeping, but schools were to be given only until April to come up with new names. Furthermore, the board had been moving ahead with this ludicrous plan during a perilous time, with schools having been shut down for a year and no plan in place to reopen them for in-person learning.
It didn’t help matters that the school board, in attempting to defend itself, merely revealed the fathomless ignorance of those who had made the decisions. Things got particularly embarrassing when the New Yorker interviewed Gabriela Lopez, the head of the school board. At one point, the interviewer, Isaac Chotiner, prodded, “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 slaveholder 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.”
In response, Lopez served up an illiterate word salad: “I see what you’re saying. 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.”
Chotiner tried again: “Part of the problem is that the ties may not be what the committee said they were.”
At that point, Lopez said, “So then, you go into discrediting the work that they’re doing and the process that they put together in order to create this list. … I don’t want to get into a process where we then discredit the work that this group has done.”
Get that? Asking historically relevant questions is somehow unfairly “discrediting” the group's work. Her feelings don't care about your facts.
It turns out that this absurdity could not hold even in San Francisco, the capital city of left-wing nuttery.
After weeks of backlash, Lopez finally conceded that pushing through the renaming, particularly when the district can’t even find a way to get children in classrooms, was not such a good idea.
Calling the debate over renaming “distracting," she wrote, “I acknowledge and take responsibility that mistakes were made in the renaming process.” All meetings of the renaming committee have been canceled until further notice, and she vowed that any revived effort would involve more input from the community and consultation with actual historians.
The victory may be short-lived — in fact, we'd bet on it — and the renaming effort could return after the pandemic. But what this small victory does show is that even in the most liberal of places, sane people can fight back against cancel culture and win. It is worth keeping up the fight to preserve history and truth.
