A Shit Sandwich of SF Politics
You may have missed the shitshow of the last week regarding School Board member Allison Collins. I’ve gotten enough private messages from people who are very upset and feel like they can’t speak freely that I feel a responsibility to offer some context and perspective.
Several things are happening simultaneously and it can be hard to untangle the threads.
In the midst of horrible racist hate crimes against Asians and the need for real solidarity for API communities, on Friday morning some tweets surfaced that Allison had posted in December of 2016 about her own experience of anti-black racism in schools with significant Chinese populations. The old tweets were systematically amplified by twitter trolls and bots, many out of state, until Jill Tucker at the Chronicle ran a headline a few hours later that there were “racist” tweets and Asian families were upset and thus began calls for Allison to resign, which ultimately reached a crescendo over the weekend.
Meanwhile, you will recall that Lowell High School, supposedly the best public high school in SFUSD, had this year decided to shift from “merit-based” admissions to a lottery. The “merit” system managed to surprise surprise keep Black and Latino students out of Lowell. The mostly white and Asian-American people upset about Lowell moving away from merit-based admissions are school segregationists who are upset that the riffraff will spoil their precious school.
There are complicated and difficult questions about how to support high-achieving students in a diverse school district, how to reduce educational disparities, the myriad of ways public schools have failed Black and Latino students, segregation, and the scarcity mindset in which an entire City gets one allegedly good school and the rest of the district can fuck right off. But this isn’t it. I asked my dad, who spent over three decades working on desegregation and educational disparities in SFUSD, what he thought about Lowell. He said, “Lowell doesn’t particularly have better teachers than any other school. Lowell creams the highest achieving students from across the district to make it look like the best school. The assumption built into merit based admissions is that Black and Latino students don’t score because of some personal failing, and not structural racism.” None of these hard and important questions are part the conversation happening right now.
It turned out that the same people digging up Collins’ old tweets were also people mad about seeing more Black people at Lowell. They had formed Friends of Lowell the same day, and announced a lawsuit challenging the end of merit admissions at Lowell immediately after the Collins tweets were surfaced.
But wait, it gets worse.
By early in the week, it was clear that the anti-Collins/save Lowell people have a real problem with Black people and found a handy issue to skewer Collins with. By that point, every elected official in SF was calling for Collins’ resignation because they never liked her, or because they obviously made a calculation that this situation was becoming too much of a liability and they needed to contain it. The Chronicle app pushing new breaking notifications about it seemingly every five seconds didn’t help.
There is a great deal of overlap between the mad at Collins people, the save Lowell people, the recall the Board of Ed people, the reopen the school people, and the recall Chesa Boudin people. If you were not on twitter seeing the garbage they’re cranking out, (lucky you, and) you might miss the scope and intensity of it. For instance, the Asian parent quoted favorably by Jill Tucker was casually linking Allison to Jim Jones of the People’s Temple, who led a cult that involved the deaths of hundreds of Black people.
Not to mention some of these parents, allegedly concerned about racism, went on Glen Beck’s show. Or that the person bringing the lawsuit against the Lowell admissions policy is Republican Harmeet Dhillon, known for such hits as suing to block a safe sleeping site for homeless people in the Haight. Or another of the save Lowell people is called Christine Linnebach, previously involved in blocking affordable housing in Forest Hills. Their Facebook group is chock-full of alt-right talking points about race.
In the course of this, I tweeted something. Then Jill Tucker replied to me in a shitty way, promptly blocked me, and I got piled on by her troll army on twitter, who also started prank calling my phone and making nasty comments on my youtube clips. It turned out Chronicle reporter Jill Tucker whose beat is SFUSD has been systematically blocking on twitter SFUSD parents who disagree with her takes on the district, and is a member of the “recall SFBOE” facebook group. So that’s fun.
In other news, the lottery worked immediately. Today, the Lowell alumni association announced changes in the incoming 9th grade class. Latinos comprised 12.5% of 2020 offers but 22.6% of 2021 offers; Black 9th graders went from 1.9% in 2020 to 4.8% in 2021.
It’s complicated, so let me try to sum up a bunch of shit that is true all at the same time. Anti-Asian racism is real and awful and “should be fought to the death,” in the words of my new hero Xhao Zhen Xie, the 75 year old grandmother who beat the shit out of her assailant downtown. Also, anti-Blackness is real and awful, and should be fought to the death. In the words of my old hero John Brown, “there will be no peace in this land until slavery is done for.” Also, Allison Collins is an elected official and deserves criticism like all elected officials. It is not for me as a White to say if her original thread was off base with regards to Asians. I do know that conflicts between communities of color are not new — we’ve been talking about this shit since the Rodney King riots at least. Collins has clearly made other mistakes that have made her an easy target, and some API folks were genuinely offended by her behavior. And, also, none of us who are not Black are entitled to opinions about Black women’s use of the n-word. And, whatever Collins’ other shortcomings, the Chronicle and Jill Tucker and Heather Knight and everyone defending “merit” at Lowell and pushing this Collins’ tweets story are knowingly and intentionally stoking animosity between communities of color. It is disgusting to see reactionary white and Asian folks cynically exploiting real pain around anti-Asian violence to advance a segregationist agenda. In the rush to condemn Collins’ alleged anti-Asian bias, what has been completely skipped past is her original point about anti-Blackness. People keep saying she’s failed the 30–40% of the school district who are Asian, and no one is saying that everyone has failed the 6% of the school district who are Black. There are hard and longstanding issues here, that cut across many charged political questions, and there is a nuanced conversation that has to happen, and we need to find solidarity. I wouldn’t presume to know what the right thing to do is or how to get to where we need to go, but I know for sure this isn’t it.
Since I wrote an earlier version of this, some bullshit happened with the DCCC and the School Board.
Ok I’ll shut up now. I didn’t even talk about reopening and my many opinions about governance and oversight by volunteer commissions of public bureaucracies. I’ve had it.
Nato Green is a comedian and union organizer, former SFUSD student and current SFUSD parent. Nato Green
