You may remember the Vice President of the San Francisco school board, Alison Collins. In addition to being firmly committed to the board’s school renaming nonsense, Collins is the person who last October said, “When we talk about merit, meritocracy and especially meritocracy based on standardized testing. I’m just going to say it, in this day and age we cannot mince words. Those are racist systems.” Around the same time she also wrote on her blog, “Being a ‘model-minority’ is not something to covet or celebrate.”
The context here is important. The SF school board temporarily shut down competitive admissions at Lowell High School, which is widely admired as the city’s best high school. One result of competitive admission at Lowell has been an overrepresentation of Asian students. Asian students make up 29% of the school district but they were 51% of the student body at Lowell.
That clearly bothered Collins and other members of the school board. In February, the school board fast tracked a vote to permanently end competitive admissions at Lowell to address the lack of diversity at the school. That move created a backlash from some parents who felt they were having an outstanding school taken away from them because of the board’s woke ideology. Those parents started a campaign called Recall SF School Board seeking to remove three of the five board members who voted to get rid of competitive admissions at Lowell, including Collins.
Yesterday Recall SF School Board said it had discovered a bunch of old tweets (from 2016) by Collins which show anti-Asian bias.
30 REASONS TO RECALL THE SF SCHOOL BOARD
19. Commissioner Collins appears biased against Asian Americanshttps://t.co/lX2Q0IhFyw pic.twitter.com/LyAe6gty13
— Recall SF School Board (@recallsfboe) March 19, 2021
Here’s a sample: “Many Asian Am. believe they benefit from the ‘model minority’ BS…They use white supremacist thinking to assimilate and ‘get ahead.'”
In fact many Asian American Ts, Ss, and Ps actively promote these myths. They use white supremacist thinking to assimilate and "get ahead".
— Alison Collins 高勵思 (@AliMCollins) December 4, 2016
Yahoo News has a story up about the tweets, including the most offensive ones:
Collins, who did not respond to a request for comment, accused “many Asian American Ts, Ss, and Ps” — teachers, students, and parents — of promoting “the ‘model minority’ BS” and of using “white supremacist thinking to assimilate and ‘get ahead.’”…
She then demanded to know “[w]here are the vocal Asians speaking up against Trump?”
“Don’t Asian Americans know they are on his list as well?” Collins continued. “Do they think they won’t be deported? profiled? beaten? Being a house n****r is still being a n****r. You’re still considered “the help.”
Recall SF School Board put out a press release yesterday calling for the resignation of Collins and four other board members: “These tweets exhibit significant anti-Asian bias. This would be unacceptable for any elected official, but especially so in a school district where over a third of the children are Asian.”
Recall SF School Board Campaign: Press Release. https://t.co/kE0NvcDDnC pic.twitter.com/BpJx1CH8I7
— Recall SF School Board (@recallsfboe) March 19, 2021
Just this week we had the black editor of a progressive magazine forced to resign because of tweets about Asians she wrote a decade ago in high school. Will the people who were outraged about a 17-year-old’s (admittedly dumb) tweets demand Alison Collins resign? These tweets are a lot more recent and a lot more offensive. More importantly, there’s no reason to think Collins has changed her views since then. As noted above she was saying much the same thing last year.
Unfortunately, what Collins is saying here is now a pretty common view among woke progressives. Asians who succeed through hard work (such as getting into competitive Lowell High School) are not praised for their success but denigrated by people like Collins for succumbing to the “model minority myth” as a way of “getting ahead.” Collins would evidently prefer that Asian students not excel at places like Lowell or Harvard because, from a woke perspective, Asian success is complicity in an unjust system. Anyone who disagrees is necessarily a racist under Ibram Kendi’s definition of the word.
For people like Collins, Asian success makes you into something despicable, a kind of traitor to your race. It’s no wonder she wanted to prevent Lowell High School from continuing to be a majority-Asian success story.
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