The solidarity among San Francisco’s political class in calling for school board vice president Alison Collins to resign is stunning in its damn-near unanimity. Absent some feel-good bond measures, it’s hard to recall a municipal shield wall quite this tight.
Everyone can easily be for funding parks and playgrounds and kiddies and sea walls. Here, everyone is against Collins. That’s different.
In 2019, every San Francisco politico and their Uncle Steve lined up against vape-juice titan Juul’s attempt to undo city law and write its own regulations. In 2006, every last vestige of the City Family lined up to decry newsman Pete Wilson’s harangue regarding gay supervisor Bevan Dufty and his lesbian friend Rebecca Goldfader having a child.
This is neither good nor pleasant company for Collins to find herself in. The next Board of Education meeting is slated for 3 p.m. today, and it remains to be seen how good and pleasant that will be.
The Board of Education has been in the headlines a bit even prior to the pandemic, and these were not flattering headlines. There was the polarizing decision to paint over murals at George Washington High School depicting our founding father as the slave-owner and Indian-fighter he was. There was the vote to rename 44 schools despite provably shoddy historical research, an arbitrary and sloppy process from the renaming committee — and despite the fact all the schools are closed. There was the vote to remove the merit-based entrance system at Lowell High School. And there is the ongoing misery regarding the city’s shuttered schools, spaced-out Zoom students, declining enrollment and the school board’s deliberate decision to not hire a consultant to form pandemic plans.
The school district and Board of Education are presently staving off a lawsuit filed by the City Attorney regarding those sclerotic reopening plans. These are not good and pleasant times.
Add to all this a series of incendiary 2016 Collins tweets describing anti-Blackness among Asian Americans, last week unearthed by online partisans opposed to altering Lowell’s admission plans and pushing a recall effort for Collins and two other commissioners.
This material was quickly seeded into the mainstream media, where headlines simply and unambiguously described Collins’ tweets as “racist.” Calls for her ouster grew deafening — and, separate and apart from the content of those tweets, a city leader’s decision on what to say about Collins soon became a political calculation.
It’s never an ideal situation when extreme partisans call the tune and make everybody dance. And that definitely happened here.
But Collins’ protestations that her comments were being taken “out of context” befuddled the Asian Americans who subsequently reached out to her (as did her apology — not for what she said, but for how it was received). A tweetstorm is not a Dostoevsky novel; it doesn’t take that much time to read and re-read it. If you’re complaining people missed nuance and context, maybe it wasn’t there to start with.
The tweets say what they say — and say what they say regardless of who’s publicizing them. And when.
Collins is now in the difficult position she’s in not just because of what she wrote in 2016, but how she handled matters when confronted on it in 2021.
Nobody is coming out of this looking good. And it didn’t have to be this way.
“Hey Twitter!” began Collins’ Dec. 4, 2016 tweetstorm. “Does anyone know about any news stories highlighting hate speech or bullying of Asian students? Please send them my way.”
The next tweet continues “I’m looking to combat anti-black racism in the Asian community at at (sic) my daughters’ mostly Asian Am school.”
Collins is the only Black woman on the school board (though these tweets were written two years before her election). And it warrants mentioning — and unambiguously mentioning: It is not racist for a Black woman to call out anti-Blackness. Collins, in her tweets, recounts her own lived experience and that of her daughters.
These tweets continued, however. And they veered into places that many Asian Americans I spoke to felt were, if not racist, still harmful — playing into longstanding stereotypes about Asian Americans in a casually broad and reckless way.
“Many Asian Am. believe they benefit from the ‘model minority’ BS.” Collins continued in 2016. “In fact many Asian American[s] actively promote these myths. They use white supremacist thinking to assimilate and ‘get ahead’.”
Collins also wrote “Where are the vocal Asians speaking up against Trump? Don’t Asian Americans know they are on his list as well?”
And, for her crescendo, she tweeted, “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.’”
Jenny Lam, the only Chinese American school board member in San Francisco’s heavily Asian school district, told me she felt the tweets played into generalizations that “for a group of people, Asian Americans, if you want to get ahead, you’re supporting white supremacy.”
Norman Yee, a former president of both the Board of Supervisors and Board of Education, felt that Collins’ call-out of Asians for not being vocal played into longstanding stereotypes of Asians as docile and passive. “None of us spoke out against Trump? This is bullshit.”
Other Asian American San Franciscans — elected leaders, political activists, regular folks, twentysomethings, thirtysomethings, fortysomethings, seventysomethings, all politically liberal — expressed a wide array of disappointment and pain.
If the problem is white supremacy and white supremacist systems, several said, why level so much blame on Asians? Why refer to Asian Americans as if the community is monolithic? And if you’re going to use the term “house n****r” to refer to Asians — why have an Asian name in your Twitter bio?
(Collins’ Chinese name, 高勵思, is pronounced in Cantonese as “Go Lai Si.” The first character, which is an actual Chinese last name, translates as “tall” or “high.” The second translates as “to encourage.” The last means “to think.” These are all words and notions that would figure to appeal to Asian voters looking at Board of Education candidates. What’s more, casual monolingual Chinese voters would not be able to distinguish this strategically appealing, manufactured name from a Chinese candidate’s actual name. In 2019, non-Chinese candidates were barred from crafting non-phonetic translations of their names).
The atmosphere in December 2016 was not the same as it is in March 2021. Asian Americans were indeed on Trump’s list. Collins’ tweets hit the mainstream at the height of a wave of anti-Asian hate crimes, presumably fueled by use of terms such as “Kung Flu” and “Chinese Flu” by Trump and his gang.
Asian Americans in San Francisco, even those inclined to support Collins — or at least elements of her worldview — would never be a less charitable audience.
And Collins soon gave them little reason to be.
Alison Collins did not return our calls or texts. This is an experience we share with a number of prominent San Francisco leaders, including Asian Americans who had supported Collins in 2018.
Those who did speak with Collins told me the calls were one-sided and defensive — and they were confused why they had to reach out to Collins and not vice-versa. Lam says she was not inclined to advocate for Collins’ resignation until after their phone conversation ended. Lam says Collins was unapologetic and that “voices were raised.”
And this is where things went off the rails.
Left-leaning San Francisco politicians calling for Collins’ resignation — both Asian and not Asian — know the score. Web partisans unearthed some low-hanging fruit, the mainstream media picked up the story, and Collins was quickly irradiated and weaponized.
“We all got played here,” one tells me. “But how can we as Asian leaders defend her when she doesn’t give us anything? We can’t make her be contrite.”
Collins, who was a private citizen in 2016, is entitled to think what she thinks and write what she writes. But, regardless of the political intentions of the Lowell partisans and recall folks who got this ball rolling — there are plenty of awkward-at-best comments about Black people to be found on the Internet, and the married couple pushing the Board of Education recall went on race-bating conspiracy-theorist Glenn Beck’s program — the tweets say what they say.
And, regardless of newspapers blithely using the term “racist tweets” — reductively transforming a complicated situation into a simple one, applying a metaphorical scarlet letter and minimizing the very real problems of systemic anti-Blackness — the tweets say what they say.
For Collins not to acknowledge why so many Asian Americans, including former allies and endorsers, would react so strongly, for her not to pick up on the raw pain Asian Americans are feeling now — this is more than a political miscalculation. It reveals an inability to listen and a lack of judgment and empathy.
But it was also a political miscalculation. And that’s why every last vestige of San Francisco government is now calling for Collins to step down. Because even her ideological allies see where this could go: This could be the French Laundry moment for the nascent recall attempt of Collins and fellow commissioners Faauuga Moliga and Gabriela López. Failure to fall into line and call for Collins to go could be weaponized further against an elected official, as it was in the case of Ross Mirkarimi. This has become a litmus test of sorts.
Oh, the places this could go.
So, the uniformity here is not surprising. These tweets do not read well. Collins’ response may have been an even greater disaster. It’s hard to imagine any elected official or city leader expending political capital and jumping in front of a bullet in an attempt to nuance this — especially when Collins has been part of a Board of Education that has embarrassed the city and enraged many of San Francisco’s highest-propensity voters.
“So we’re doing the exact opposite of what she said we do,” said Yee, the primary author of the letter that was signed onto by much of San Francisco’s past and present Asian American (and not Asian American) leadership.
“We’re using our voices.”
Ms. Collins demands that others agree to her bizarre premises before she will have a “conversation” with them. What kind of mind and character demands that?
When did “ill-farted” become a euphamism for racist?
“And, regardless of newspapers blithely using the term “racist tweets” — reductively transforming a complicated situation into a simple one, applying a metaphorical scarlet letter and minimizing the very real problems of systemic anti-Blackness — the tweets say what they say.”
Why is it that racism coming from the left “complicated” while racism from the right is clear as day?
You should be just as ready to call out racism from your friends as your enemies.
The simplest explanation is that Allison Collins is a racist who dislikes Asian people. You can try to spin it all you want, but that’s the obvious conclusion.
Racism coming from the SJWs is “complicated” and requires context.
Their racism is in pursuit of a greater good so if you don’t like their racism, it’s because you are racist. Or so I am told.
Some sjw’s have gotten too comfortable with anti-asian racism.
First we should all compliment Joe Eskenazi on the best piece of journalistic writing in this whole crazy drama – it’s not easy sorting it out and there aren’t too many players talking to reporters these days. Joe has his facts right, strikes a tone that fits a combination of objectivity and amazement at where this has gone, and jumps in to respond to readers. Great work, Joe. I share many of the sentiments expressed here on all sides, but it got pretty ugly at times. We need to be more civil – there is a lot of intelligence in these responses and we can all make our fiercest points without getting personal and mean-spirited. As for Alison Collins, she never should have used the “model minority” and “field vs house servants” analogies – they are hurtful to all groups, unnecessary, as she could have made her points without these references. She was speaking as a mom in 2016, fearful for her daughters’ well-being, and she lashed out. Wrong, beneath her, and she’s paying now. But do we want to fire everyone who messes up? That’s the go-to solution with every mistake – “You’re fired!” Sound familiar? Is that going to fix things? Does Ms. Collins ouster send a message ( I doubt it as we’ve been firing people over this for decades and it still happens)? Or do we think she is so awful she needs to go so we get someone better? (That should happen at the ballot box and she’s up for re-election in November 2022.) Or are we angry and want to punish her and others who mis-speak? (If that’s the case, very little gets solved.) This is a moment we can seize and use to heal and grow. A community forum, pass the mic around, have Ms. Collins sit with those she hurt and be part of the solution. Then we all gain from a thorough experience based in our compassion. I believe Ms. Collins would emerge transformed and we would be an example of an alternative to “You’re fired!” In November ’22 we can all decide the next chapter, so if removal is the answer, it will have its day. I also want to compliment Korbi Ghosh on the April 9 piece he wrote – the sentiment, the logic, the depth of his expression was really encouraging. It was surprising to me that one responder accused him of making it all about himself, when I thought he stepped outside of his own experience to see what Alison Collins was trying to say. There are countless views of this and I am continually struck by the insights and angles coming from different people. I know there’s a lot of passion here but we defeat the whole purpose of this dialogue by going off on each other, because that will create deeper division and this will continue to happen.
I tend to not read comment sections because people just say mean things to each other, this comment section was not too bad and I learned some things. Do we agree her lawsuit is offensive and completely self-defeating? Does anyone like her now? Her lawsuit is incredibly tone deaf. Here’s a good Twitter quote: “These lawsuits make good news headlines but don’t do anything to help us remove the barriers that are keeping schools from opening.” – Alison Collins.
I’m by any measure very far left, but the fear for me was always that ‘woke’ culture and was more performative than principled, and Collins pretty much personifies these fears. I want her out, and I don’t want her to go quietly because this performative-vs-principled conversation is something we need to have but gets silenced by the shouters.
I find her Trump condemnation strangely tone-deaf. I never heard Trump DENIGRATE a race. More than a few countries – yes – BUT NEVER a racial group.
And why we are at it, does anyone deny that the predominate racial groups attacking Asians and motivated by anti-Asian bias are clearly non-White….dare I say African-American…….by and large?
Nice to know she stands by those racial stereotypes.
For whatever it’s worth, I’d bet the NYTimes would not have run it’s piece on the SF school board yesterday were it not for the reporting here.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/29/us/san-francisco-schools-racism.html?searchResultPosition=3
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/29/us/san-francisco-schools-racism.html?searchResultPosition=3
I love how the majority of comments on this story prove Collins’ point in the first place–that anti-blackness is on full display in the San Francisco public school system. Literally dozens of comments decrying Collins’ “racism” and then talking about the only thing holding back black students is their work ethic. Big yikes.
So @blinky–what is holding them back? Are you saying there are only white teachers and resources aides at schools? I think all students regardless of color are capable of learning–so why is it then? Do you think people went-oh they’re black(NEXT) like that? What about the black and latino kids that do go to Lowell-how did they make it? It’s not always about racism. It’s also about opportunities that may not have been accepted/taken, it might also be about family/home life problems, it might also be about medical problems that affect learning, it might be about pop culture where being smart isn’t always the coolest, it’s a lot of things. But to say that it is solely because of race is wrong-it IS racism when someone says that another race uses white supremecist methodology/thinking to get ahead. Just imagine someone said that about your race. I don’t think you would agree either. Take and use the opportunities, don’t be jealous and blame it on racism left and right every time!
Alison Collins used “house nigger” in her Tweets about Asian Americans. I guess that makes my parents house niggers (Malcom X: “The house Negroes–they lived in the house with master, they dressed pretty good, they ate good because they ate his food–what he left…”). My parents lived in the white family’s house in Atherton, ate the same food, had a car provided for them, dressed well (in a maid’s uniform)…and cleaned their toilets, wiped up their puke, washed windows, cooked and served them all their meals (respond to the bell for the next course), waxed the floors on their knees, made their beds. My parents were the ”help.”
And, yes, they wanted to “to assimilate and ‘get ahead.’” My father picked strawberries in the sweltering sun, not complaining to the boss – he was trying to get ahead; he and my mom were trying to make a life in America: assimilation? It was interrupted when white supremacists imprisoned them in the Topaz, Utah concentration camp. But, afterward, they were still committed to assimilating and getting ahead, by working hard and saving their money like good white supremacists; enough to pay for their son’s college education and then, later, retire. But I guess this isn’t enough for Collins since they didn’t speak up, or become activists, or confront their tormentors, and therefore remained niggers.
Hisashi Sugaya
San Francisco
This you?
https://www.sfweekly.com/news/tenderloin-community-demands-apology-from-hisashi-sugaya-for-drug-remark/
You people in San Francisco deserve each other.
I just finished reading all the comments. This is a perfect final summary, unfortunately. It’s a shame that the likes of Allison Collins is what passes as representative of “progressive” San Francisco. She needs to resign and spend some time thinking about how her selfish and divisive political agenda has been so detrimental to the real work that the board needs to do — especially in this time.
It’s interesting how you want to talk about anti-blackness but fail to mention how the overwhelming majority of attacks on Asians come from blacks, which has been this way for decades. There was even a 2010 article from SF Gate called “dirty secret of black on asian violence is out”
What she said was wrong. She was rightfully let go. You commenters are too smart for your own good. No need to overcomplicate every issue you come across. I don’t know you, you don’t know me. We’re all human. It’s never going to be perfect. Some will agree with you, and others won’t. It doesn’t mean that one side is right or wrong. Learn to live with empathy and compassion. Stop making everything racist. We’re all in this together but we no longer have the ability to discuss issues without hurt feelings, name calling and attempts to cancel each other. Through all the degrees and academics, you all have forgot how to carry on adult conversations
Collins is anti Asian as seen through her tweets and her actions. She literally calls anyone who thinks Lowell provides poor students in SF a high quality college prep program on par with SI, University et al. “a bunch of racists”. Then to equate Asians as house N’s who align to white supremacism ideology shows total ignorance of Chinese history. To add insult to injury she states that she knows Asian culture because her kids went to an Asian school.
Go to China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, The US, Canada….anywhere in the world with a Chinese culture and you will find a familial devotion to education as a means to provide financial security for your family. In 600, Wu Zetian, Tang Dynasty Empress, expanded use of the civil service exam to improve her bureaucracy. This exam, which must certainly have had some cultural bias favoring the wealthy, opened the door to a middle class life to anyone willing to put in the work (poor or wealthy) to study and pass the exam. Sort of like the Lowell entrance exam.
Collins must go, she has no ability to serve SFUSD as a leader. Those defending her on the grounds that Asian’s are racist against African Americans wake up. There is at least equal African American racism against Asians and NO ONE would defend an Asian saying about African Americans what Collins said about Asians.
Here’s how racist white people use the model minority to deny racism…..
‘Model Minority’ Myth Again Used As A Racial Wedge Between Asians And Blacks
April 19, 2017
https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2017/04/19/524571669/model-minority-myth-again-used-as-a-racial-wedge-between-asians-and-blacks
Bye, bye Allison. Don’t the door hit you on the way out!
Collins is completely one-sided in her view of anti-Blackness among Asians. How often do you hear news of Asians committing violent crimes against Blacks? What about vice versa? Here, in New York City, the number of attacks on Asian elders by Black men is completely disproportional to the city’s demographics. And yet, Collins is digging in her heels, completely convinced that Asians are the evil ones for simply living and wanting to improve their lives.
Very interesting and informative to read this article and all the comments. Having lived the past 20 years in the Hawaiian Islands gives me a different perspective than some. There is no “majority” here. Overall people just seem to get along with each other and having friends and acquaintances from all groups is the norm.
It’s very true that there are “Asians” from many different backgrounds and skin tones who also don’t think in a monolithic way. Among many “Asian” cultures hard work, family and commitment to excellence are very important. Meritocracy has roots at least as far back as Confucius before they were even deeply exposed to “European” culture. The traditional family structure was historically prevalent and encouraged in African American society from long ago until at least the mid 1960’s when the Great Society programs discouraged it. Minority businesses in big cities thrived. It’s obvious the many millions of successful African Americans became so through hard work and wise decision making. Though Malcolm X is at times referred to, his comments quoted above are little known or discussed. Character was important as evidenced by Martin Luther King’s famous speech. Is character education taught in today’s schools or emphasized in our country?
Dividing groups based on race won’t solve issues. Showing respect for and listening to the perspectives of others will often lead to progress which is good for everyone. The average person just wants to get along with others and live in a society that works toward meeting their needs and the needs of others in a peaceful, safe environment.
Comparing white people to demons is beyond the pale. This is standard operating procedure for Collins. This is not the type of person that should be on the school board.
https://twitter.com/AliMCollins/status/896836910961745920?s=20
^^ Dino, that’s incorrect. Collins was comparing “white supremacy” to demons, not white people.
https://twitter.com/AliMCollins/status/896836910961745920?s=20
“White supremacy” and “whiteness” is the ideology which defines who is white who supports whiteness. There’s no such thing as “white people”. If you are “white”, the question you ask is “what was I before I was white?” Whiteness is a faulty ideology that should be dismantled.
So with regards to Asian people, what defines one as a model minority (house negro) is their level of support for whiteness. If an Asian person internalizes the model minority stereotypes, they will have proven to the real whites in charge they are worthy. It is then, an honorary white person position will be bestowed upon the loyal Asian. With this position, this fortunate Asian will have access to the huge stash of opportunities which the white establishment has hoarded.
But of course, the honorary white status is provisional and can be revoke at anytime depending on the political expediencies of the “real white people” in charge. That’s because whiteness is an ever evolving construct that benefits those who are in power and are free to define whiteness as they see fit. Whiteness may or may not include LBGTQ people or it may not include you if you get disabled or it may not include you if you came from a poor family. So even those who feel secure in their whiteness may not be so secure once the definition is sharpened and you get excluded.
Utter nonsense. She was putting down white people and that’s how I perceived it. Collins uses this type of inflammatory rhetoric constantly. She could use Twitter and other mediums in a positive and constructive way but she chooses not to. She doesn’t belong on the school board.
You’re wasting your breath, I’m afraid. Half of the people ranting here are doing so because they have no familiarity with the world of scholarship about race and no willingness to try to understand it, and the other half (like the one you’re responding to) are racist wingnuts who’ve clicked over directly from the Breitbart/NYPost comments section purely for the purpose of posting rambling unreadable screeds about how critical race theory is the devil. Even the *reporters* who have been giddily covering this controversy have no interest in engaging with any of this stuff as context for their stories that would help readers make sense of what Collins meant; the level of sophistication that the average Chron journalist has on this topic is “OOOH that lady used the n-word, that automatically means she did a racism.”
I have to touch back on the Freedom of Our Speech earlier comment.
Have we suddenly forgotten that mayoral candidate Ellen Lee Zhou and during her campaign, Zhou ran into controversy for paying to erect a billboard that depicted a racist scene involving Mayor London Breed.
Zhou’s billboard was vile and a reprehensible political ad that invoked racist, misogynistic and sexist perspectives.
The Chinese American Alliance whom themselves proven are racist against Blacks, Latinos and the LGBTQ community have given Zhou their full support and backed Zhou’s racist views and position.
What’s even more sickening is that Zhou still holds her position with the California Civil Grand Juror Association as director of public relations and is a behavioral health clinician (sounds like Zhou is in need of behavioral health therapy herself).
Why hasn’t Zhou been made or voted to be removed from her city position? This just confirms that it’s ok for an Asian woman to pay to erect a billboard that depicted a racist scene and make racist comments but when a woman of color that is constitutionally protected gives her freedom of speech, the towns people are screaming for her blood.
What’s even more sickening is that in Atlanta the recent shooting and at the scene of the shooting, a Latino male named Mario Gonzalez who is Mexican was stereotyped, detained and handcuffed by Atlanta police for hours. He explained to the police that he was notified that his wife was one of the fatalities and he wanted to go to her. He was NOT allowed but an Asian man was allowed to go to his wife who was also a fatality. Even during that horrific moment, a male of color (Latino male) was already being stereotyped, looked at as the killer and detained. Feel free to check it out, it’s on NBC news. I can also promise you that if a Black male were at the scene, he too would have been stereotyped, detained and gunned down by the police, no questions asked. Yet NO ISSUES for the asian man; he was not detained for hours, stereotyped, NOTHING. This is DISCRIMINATION and RACISM at its finest.
I too want to know why are Asians afforded the privilege of choosing during their immigration process an “American Name” in addition to their Chinese legal name? This privilege is NOT afforded to Nigerians, Latinos, Trinidadians, Africans, Iranians but to Asians. And they have the nerve to talk about “White Privilege”. Sounds like Asian privilege to me in American. It is true, we do NOT see Asian children in immigration dog cages and ripped away from their parents. We see only Latinos and Afro Latinos, that’s FOUL and DISGUSTING.
I can say that in the city hiring system of HR the positions are largely held by Asians. What is happening is Asian HR personnel are filtering out and removing the applicants that are of color. They are then forwarding to the hiring manager those applicants that are Asian. If the hiring manager is Asian and you are a person of color you can forget about getting the position. Especially if it is a high paying position. If they do hire a Black or Latino applicant, that is a front that the manager to show fairness in the hiring process. If you are Black or Latino, you are guaranteed to NEVER pass your 6 month probation as you are looked at as not qualified in the first place, uneducated, a liar and a thief.
Finally and rest assured, the position will be filled with an Asian applicant. Complaints have been filed on this discrimination that is UNFAIR hiring and DISCRIMINATION against people of color. We will NEVER be given a fair chance.
In closing and the truth is, who really continues to really be discriminated here, they are BLACK and Latinos in this county and city, they continue to be KILLED and DISCRIMINATED by the police and society it’s a fact. The Asian cop during the George Floyd murder said NOTHING and did NOTHING to stop the murder from taking place, he is an accessory to MURDER, a MURDER to a man of color, need it say more. WAKE UP everyone.
Nothing was taken out of context. Her quotes are consistent with her actions and things she’s said to Victor and I at several events when we supported 8th grade algebra. She has been very, very rude to Josephine Zhao on multiple occasions in public, at meetings, and said disrespectful things about her. She called hundreds of Lowell parents, mostly Asian, racist on a hot mic and destroyed Lowell, a world class school many Asians and others are very proud of in world rankings, #2 on AP.
Please don’t buy into the idea that this is a one-time error in judgement. She didn’t get drunk and say something insulting to Asians which didn’t represent what is truly in her heart. If she had I’d be open to restoration. But her comments are completely representative of her life’s work, which has been to fight for and implement policies which are damaging to and unfair to Asians.
Ask most Asian American families who fit this scenario one question. They worked thousands of hours and spend tens of thousands of dollars on tutoring, and spent time teaching their kids to read before kindergarten (60% of Asian American parents in California teach their kids to read before starting Kindergarten, compared to 16% of whites), made sure they read books every Summer, did workbooks and flashcards with them, read to them, met with teachers and made sure they did everything possible to get all As over other temptations. They sacrificed stress pressuring their kids to go the extra mile to ensure they don’t get any Bs and study for tests in the summer. They also, coincidentally, just purchased a new car for $40,000. Ask these families if they would rather, in this situation, if they had the choice, A. have Lowell become a lottery school just as their child enters 7th or 8th grade, ruining their plans or B. have a criminal push them out of their vehicle or use a weapon and steal their brand new car from them, even assuming they had no insurance.
I don’t think you’d find many Asian American families who would choose A. Nearly all would choose B, trauma included.
She committed a damage worse than carjacking to thousands of Asian American families. This is what’s in her heart. She must resign!
They were not taken out of context at all. She has expressed anti-Asian sentiment to many times and never showed any curiosity as to how Asian Americans out-earn whites quickly, nor Nigerian Americans. Asian American kids spend more hours studying than white or other ethnicities of kids, a completely factual statement, and that we need to try to increase the study hours of others to close the achievement gap. She doesn’t acknowledge studying is a choice, with girls of all races studying more than boys of the same race in all cases. Kids who choose to study choose not to hang out, watch TV, talk, play video games, or go on social media. She should be helping black kids by encouraging them to study as many hours as the average Asian kid did and sacrifice fun activities, and show the stats of income and success if they disagree. She should read ‘Triple Package’.
She clearly resents Asian Americans for believing in the American Dream and working harder, on average, than the average America. She has no curiosity as to why Asian Americans have 30% higher income than whites, more wealth, over 50% more income after a generation, 1/7th the white murder rate, under 1/7th the white homeless rate, under half the white rate of imprisonment, lower suicide rates, longer lifespans, lower divorce rates and other markers of success based on personal choice. She doesn’t want black kids to sacrifice and read summers and learn. She dismissed ‘Triple Package’ as white supremacist.
She has actively pursued policies that specifically hurt Asian American children more than any other group. Making Lowell a lottery school, eliminating 8th grade algebra and banning willful defiance suspensions, and eliminating honors, just to name a few.
She refers to Asian American’s success, higher test scores, higher income, and the other aforementioned facts as “getting ahead” in airquotes, being the help, and being a ‘House N’, which trivializes Asian American accomplishment and deservedness of admiration and credit and thanks for the sacrifice to achieve this. She is basically implying an Asian American who owns a nice home and has a high income and net worth is still, because of a hidden white supremacist subculture no one discusses, beneath a white child in a rural setting with a single mother on fentanyl, meth or heroin, in public housing, on 3 generations of welfare, without a father, getting poor grades and facing a life of poverty.
That is racist and insulting towards Asians because it diminishes their achievement, and it is insulting to whites because it assumes we are all racist and insincere in attempts to close the achievement gap, which she is wrong to call the opportunity gap, implying studying isn’t a choice and a noble sacrifice, and to help underperforming minorities improve their lives. It assumes we secretly are attempting to maintain white supremacy and using Asians as pawns in an evil plot. It assumes the worst of whites, morally, and considers Asians to be suckers, manipulated by whites.
The idea is Asian Americans can never actually get ahead, and should join her in a battle to overthrow America’s culture, which she views as hateful.
She should be teaching kids nonwhite immigrants from 70 nations and 30 African Nation out-earn whites within a generation. They do this: study way more hours, emphasize education to their kids, marry and stay married, work, study summers, focus on grades and test scores and what really matters most, avoid drugs. Black boys with fathers do far better than white boys without, so encouraging marriage, long study hours, reading, sacrifice and respect for hard work and the scientific method should be a hallmark of any decent educator.
Floyd Thursby, just now read your reply from last year. Thanks so much for writing what you did, you are so right. I’ve never before contributed to any of these local causes but this angered me so much I’ve actually sent money to this recall petition. If this City is ever to recover we have to start pushback now. Thanks again. David’.
The bulk of the the model minority (aka ‘house negro’) stereotype revolves around the fallacious idea of the American work ethic. The American work ethic postulates that if one works hard enough, one can achieve success. The harder one works, the more success a person can achieve. If this “work ethic” is acknowledged to be true, then someone who is lacking in finances is not working hard enough.
This “American work ethic” is not simply a measure of personal will and action; on top of that, it is used to judge a person’s character as “good” or “bad”. If you are impoverished, you’re probably “lazy”. Donald Trump, whose been the embodiment of the American work ethic for decades, calls them “losers” to which they should be summarily “fired”.
Embedded within the “American work ethic” is “individualism”. It’s the magical idea that one can achieve success simply by personal effort unassisted by anyone or anything else. G.H. Bush famously claimed we could “pull yourself up from your own bootstraps” which is ridiculous considering how he is propped up by his family’s vast generational wealth.
People do not achieve success solely from their own individual efforts. Someone or some system has to be there to nurture that success. Parents have to make enough money or make enough sacrifices to provide a stable environment for learning. If parents don’t make enough money, then there has to be a system to get them back on their feet. Getting a job requires an employer to give you a benefit of a doubt at some point. And your continued success requires others to think highly of you. These are all subjective judgments that we rely on to be successful. So if the gatekeepers in charge think poorly of you, even if they are in fact wrong, you will not achieve success.
So what is the “model” that’s being modeled in the “model minority”? It’s the American ideology of rugged individualism and hard work.. These “model minorities” are presented as evidence of the efficacy of the American work ethic and rugged individualism. Asians don’t protest. Asians just shut up, get to work and make that money. So in turn, what’s being communicated to Black folks (aka “field negroes”) is if they model that behavior, they will also achieve success. And if you‘re not successful, then maybe you haven’t been working hard enough or you’re just “lazy”.
So now were back to “laziness”. Who are people suspected of “laziness” because their average family wealth is about a 10th of that of white families? Who are stereotyped as “hard working”? Hard working vs lazy. Good person vs bad person.
The problem is that many Asians have internalized the model minority stereotype as evidenced by the responses here. Asian-Americans believe in their inherent superiority and goodness. Asians believe in a merit based system. Asians believe they worked harder than Black folks. Asians believe they are so damn smart, they can figure out something based on what they already know. Since Asians think they’re pretty smart, they get pretty arrogant when new information is presented that contradicts their worldview. So they’re easily trolled into piling on to one relatively insignificant person and ignoring the growing fascist movement that threatens our democracy. Asian-Americans like this don’t show up to protests when unarmed Black folks get shot dead. I’ve been to numerous police brutality protests and Asians are like unicorns. Actions speak louder than words.
The “Stereotype Threat” is when you are stereotyped, you end up becoming that stereotype. This model minority stereotype is not something that is explicitly stated. It’s a number of assumptions and expectations that people have towards Asians. Like if people say you’re a “hard worker”, they don’t necessarily mean you are a hard worker; rather, that is a representation of their own personal biases about Asians. So when these “expectations” are repeated to you over and over, you end up complying with these constant demands and end up being a “model minority”. This happens in an unconscious way over a period of time. You are a model minority by default. The only way to stop being a model minority is to consciously reject it. It will require quite a bit of humility. Humility in knowing that “I ain’t all that”, that you don’t know it all and that your successes in life were the result of others helping you out along the way.
Humility is important. So when someone uses the term “House N*****”, instead of getting offended like an over-entitled douche (aka ‘model minority’), you ask, “why would she say that about Asian people?” “what exactly is the context behind that?” “what’s the history behind that?” Then go look it up, read some books and learn something new to which you can contribute back to the community.
Think of this as a wake-up call. Maybe you, as an Asian-American should take time off your busy life and stand in solidarity, unite and work with your fellow African-American citizens for justice for all.
You’re wrong, Nigerians prove it. You can be successful if you work hard. Many immigrants have worked harder than average and thrived. Black people do have to do exactly what Asians did to be successful. They have to study 10,000 more hours over a childhood than now and spend 10,000 hours less relaxing. That’s fair. That’s the American way. They have to stay married even if they’re no longer attracted to the person, for the good of the kids. They have to save and not waste money. Deferred gratification. Every group that starts poor has to pay their dues. Asians pay theirs. They are more moral, and more moral than whites, on average, based on study hours, out of wedlock births, savings rates, work hours, etc. It is a model which, if followed, would lead blacks to much higher incomes and wealth.
The fallacy of your argument is that you believe that capitalism can be reformed. I notice how you only mentioned Republicans in your post, as if Democrats were somehow innocent of the engaging the mechanics of capitalism to oppresses people, particularly the working class. There is no kinder, gentler capitalism.
How many Democrats use private school? Is that really designed to make opportunity more equal? White and Asian kids at most SF public schools are 8x as likely to be on a track to be a UC Grad. Most Democratic families with money feel that is too equal and use Hamlin and Burke and other schools to keep their kids from knowing poor kids well and make it 15 or 20x. Democrats are pro Capitalistic and want to pass the buck to working class whites. If you really want equality, never, ever use private school, period.
This is on point. For all of the mostly white, wealthy families advocating so much for antiracism, why are your kids attending private schools? If you were really true believers in the idea of equality, you would be trying to fix the issues in the public schools rather than hiding in private schools. Or is your advocacy just for show?
Nice piece. Vision into the zeitgeist.
MER’s commentary (March 25, 2021 at 4:37 am) is spot on. She should submit it someplace where it can be more broadly shared.
thank you, MER, for your heartfelt, educated and eloquent 3/25 post. it said it all.
mb, who is the real idiot? did i hurt your pride?
anyone who takes other people’s word without independent thinking has no mind of his own. dont call me doctor, unless you are a patient who is a baby, toddler or adolescent. i know i cant change people’s warped perception
that stems from a sinful heart, but do not impose your will on people who dont agree with you, now or ever. have a better life. i do not want to read or respond anymore to your infantile tantrums and
delusions. you are not grandiose as you claim.
Set aside the incendiary last tweet and the question of whether or not she was channeling Malcolm X for a moment. The entire rest of the thread was racist and really problematic. Switch out “Asian Am” with “African Am” and read it again. It is never okay to generalize an entire group of people, to speak for ethnic group to which you do not belong, and then explain why they are wrong for thinking the way you just attributed to them. This shows a really problematic way of thinking about Asians. There is no way Collins can serve her constituency because she’s showing that she doesn’t see Asians a individuals but as a monolith. It’s dehumanizing.
Thank you, white people (mb, jim..) for schooling me with your supreme intellect. I see now that I should not have had hurt feelings because I am too uneducated to have understood the “true meaning” of Collin’s tweets. I should not be feeling what I feel because I do not understand the concept of “white supremecy”. I will try harder in the future. Thanks again, kind sirs!
“The words that other people say mean whatever I want them to mean, and I am entitled to just make up my own silly, context-free interpretation of their words anytime I want without fear of criticism. I have hereby decided that Herman Melville’s Moby Dick is a light comedia dell’arte about the game of golf” cool, okay, got it
Overwritten. Your grandstanding masks a contempt for the “unwashed masses”.
Look, maybe some bias here as an old Lowell alum and a CCSF drop-out, but why are Lowell’s current demographics far less representative of SF population than the private college prep Lick-Wilmerding High School? And according to Wikipedia, L-W still has shop classes, unlike Lowell.
It saddens me to read comments from people condemning Asians for not being educated enough to understand made up definitions popularized and evolved today into various forms as “critical race theory” or “crit.”
This article hits it on the head bc Collins has no defense for her broad stroke generalizations of the entire Asian community that are contrary to one of the first fundamental understandings of crit: no person has a single, easily stated, unitary identity. Yet this is what she did of all Asians with her misguided tweets.
Anthony Fong, what exactly abt your history lesson of an academic writing is relatable to an individual like Deb? From my perspective saying “the truth hurts” diminishes the value she’s put into her beliefs and priorities of working hard and sacrificing to become a physician and being grateful for the opportunity. Your lecture was that she had no idea she should be unhappy and advocate for AAPI not to go down that path bc it is White supremacist thinking. Is this unity? Is this “truth” you speak of going to make a better place for all of us?
And you, MB, calling an accomished AAPI an idiot for believing in the American Dream bc she feels she is living it. You felt it that she deserves to be called out for not being familiar enough on what racism means as defined by scholars YOU subscribe to (definitions which have evolved and vary), is this really being progressive and advocating for AAPI? I, myself, found it hateful and harmful.
These are the Collins supporters and I stand in solidarity with AAPI offended here, but will not speak for them as they are more than capable of expressing themselves. I will tell all of you defending Collins trying to educate your beliefs: you should all be ashamed for hiding behind a progressive idealism but tearing people apart with your divisive words and behavior.
I’m not an expert, Latina, 1st gen, mestiza, grew up poor monolingual household, single parent, for whatever that’s worth.
I will try to explain where Collins failed based on what I know. Saying that you value family and academics implies that Black’s and Browns do not. This is a lot to take in bc it is a broad stroke and I am trying to understand it myself. But it is the argument. I even saw it made on twitter when a person that grew up in Asia said these are her cultural beliefs from her country–education and traditional family values–and she did not know them to be “White supremacist” beliefs until she came to America. Even explaining this, she was called racist. Seriously, just for making the statement bc of the “strong implication” against the communities that do not succeed that we don’t feel these are important in our culture. Apparently now we have to be careful with everything we say bc now, everything is racist as intent no longer matters, unless you’re Black apparently, then nuance does matter according to Collins’ defenders here.
I can understand that there are definitely challenging problems in my community that need to be addressed and speaking for myself I could see how disadvantaged I was merely bc my family and community did not know better bc their focus was on survival by the day having grown up poor themselves and although it was said “go to school” nobody in my community knew how to successfully enter a profession or, frankly, college. There was no emphasis on it. We just hustled, prayed, and did the best we could.
That said, I still cannot wrap my head around the belief of removing the merit system or teaching that wanting to work hard and persevere is succumbing to a “White Supremacy” belief and condemning entire communities for it. My opinion is it does more harm to my community as it allows for mediocrity and leaves my community less informed, less educated, and not able to elevate themselves without some kind of outside assistance. Plus we now have a giant chip on our shoulder and will blame, dislike, or mock anybody who tries to do these things (I recall myself being called coconut and other derogatory terms for daring to read). I personally would prefer a line of teaching that still teaches the inequities and bias, but builds ppl up to unite not marginalize, but I digress.
The term house n#@ro goes back to the days when the slaves that worked inside the home were not as opposed to slavery because they worked inside with White ppl. and felt they were treated well (broad, over generalized statement, I know). Those on the field doing hard labor had it harder, but at the end of the day, they were all still slaves and the person’s position in the home was tenuous. The slaves that worked in the home were less likely to push for abolishing the system because they did not see much wrong with it, but the master could always relegated them to hard labor.
As incomprehensible as this might be, if you follow or assume that the first thought is accurate re White Supremacy acts (which my opinion is it is not and devalues so many ppl and cultures, thus very racist), then the last sentence makes more sense where she is trying to free all of the Asian community from the bounds (White Supremacy thinking) that are tying AAPI down.
In her head, she is advocating for AAPI and those defending her believe this to be true.
The analogy Anthony makes above is that Trump threw AAPI out on the field by using terms like Chinese Flu. I don’t think they are comparable at all.
Here is where we get to varying opinions and we all have a right to form our own. I personally find it harmful to teach children that working hard and persevering are bad things. I find it harmful to pit races against each other and to continue to tell race groups they are victims or if they worked hard and became successful to call them “White adjacent” and the problem, or they are the problem bc they are White no matter socio-economic status. These are all dangerous precedents.
While I know I have had terrible disadvantages, the AAPI has had a long history of terrible harms they have quietly endured. To relegate that as just being a group to taunt, be more like, call a wedge, and continue to make fun of here knowing all of this is so heartbreaking and damaging to the community.
Tell me: what is the goal here by going down this path of convincing them to be less successful?
Collins and any City leader that supports her, including our friends and the NAACP that do not realize their support is NOT advancing our overall POC advancement, need to resign and let new unifying leaders start over.
This was thoughtful
I am just a black gay reader from cleveland with no children. But i was a social worker and prior educator with spanish language instruction for middle grade. As social worker i came in contact with asian and latin x and many poor brown and black.1 thing my experiance has taught me is that when we say things like work hard and achieve american dream it really hits differenty from immigrants community cultural knowledge and american descendent of chattle slavery. By the definition you guys are provided why are Ados not running the county their community was brought here from Africa to do break backing work to build the county . Asians were also brought to do break and life threatening work to build railroads and many other essentially infresucture and also latinx and carribian people asked to labor for essential foods yet these task are not considered hard work and study . The reason black woman might have different perspective and I don’t know miss collins nore can i apologize for her words i am speaking as adult outside of SFEDD but went to very’ merit based ” supposedly diverse school district with same school within school problem faced by students in the SFED district that had tons of african american students but few in AP class level . I was in those classes because my parents worked in the district and understood the standardized testing and got us tutors and special summer camps that allowed me to be be successful but its the fact that african american have already done tons of labor to build the nation but some how are disregard as lazy how can that happen unless the capitalism system was purposeful in keeping this group out by means of laws like redline,jim crow , segregation and cultural practice like standard testing which by their very nature catered to euro american culture and value . Immigrants from asian being given choice to american name is something i never questioned but after just a little research into migration policy we see there is a racialized component in how color plays a role down to asking if hispanic is non white or black &i don’t think it’s easy to ask afghan immigrant to be aware that there a two diffent america the one they see on tv and that is supposed granting them asylums would be treating it’s own citizen often just as bad or worse that the country they are fleeing . So while this specific person might be prejudice toward the asian community it is telling that parents and community are trying to tell us that poor “performance ” at school is because we black student don’t value hard work now we don’t value slavery and racism that does not want to pay people or protect provide resources to people because they are specially black . Even in this discourse i don’t think people are aware of how harmful it is that latin and african american are refered to as black and brown people a skin tone yet every other group is given cultural heritage identity of italian american or irish etc. It also isn’t lost on me that the people speaking of AAIP people often are not speak for darker skin vietnamese, filipina or other non East Asian groups that also work hard and want to achieve American dream – but still are looked at manual labor. I stand as an antiracist with asian american and feel a lot of empathy toward what is happening but I’m not sure this person is the true enemy. Also maybe the whole school board should go. I see a lot of ineffective boomer and millennial staff in our school board in cleveland heights and yet they are able to retire and keep getting nice salaries because they don’t speak on social media about real racial issues. What is best way forward if CRT isn’t the awnser, what solutions beside telling hard working people to work harder or ivy league education will grant access to Networks where wealth pases within a color boundary.
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1. I did not call her an idiot “for believing in the American Dream”, you’ve just completely made that claim up with zero textual evidence.
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2. The “accomplished AAPI” is a doctor. If I, a non-doctor, were to spout off in a public forum with a sentence like “You better not take that vaccine, it’s going to alter the genetic conformation of the omega-5 fatty acids in your body and give you chronic Lyme disease”, I would be roundly and justifiably ridiculed by people with expertise in medicine. Because this sentence is ignorant and not even wrong – it’s incoherent in about 5 different ways, and the FIRST way it’s incoherent is that fatty acids do not have “genetics”; that is terminology that people in medicine apply to other molecules which contain actual genes. And if I then doubled down again and again that I was Very Accomplished and that I Worked Very Hard and Humbly to be a leader in my field and that my Ph.D. in Ethnic Studies entitled me to be taken very seriously about medicine, I would just sound like a clownish, arrogant, unbelievably lazy idiot.
But when we flip this around to the humanities, oh NOW it’s “how dare you criticize someone for not being familiar with the verbiage of a field of expertise, how can you expect her to know about these things.” Hmmm.
Alison Collins wrote those tweets before she was on the school board, when her main job was activism. Her presumable primary audience for these tweets was other activists, and this is reflected in the language she used; she’s paraphrasing a Malcolm X speech and she’s using terms that come directly from CRT and related schools of thought. If the esteemed doctor is going to start popping off while cluelessly not understanding the meanings of the words she’s criticizing (because she’s too ignorant/lazy to familiarize herself with the world that Collins comes from), well, that’s her right, but she sounds like a fool. If she doesn’t want to sound like a fool, maybe it would help to crack a few books about the subject before she gets mad enough to start yelling online about something?
MB:
The contempt that you display now makes sense in that you position yourself as an “entitled” commentator in this discussion as you have a Ph.D. in Ethnic Studies. Academia is only going to get mileage in certain areas, and many times it is not applicable to real-life situations. Any valid point made is going to be torpedo by calling someone a “bozo”, that they need to read a book or dropping references to demonstrate being cultured in the Arts.
I personally think this is the failure of the Academic Left: a deep contempt for the working class or those who do not pursue a higher education. I worked with Plaintiffs’ Employment lawyers who would comment on how surprisingly “educated” their clients were. The revolution is not going to be started by academics or supporters of ruling-class parties, but by the masses they hold in contempt.
lololololololol i only have a Ph.D in Ethnic Studies ***for the purposes of having a tidy and illustrative hypothetical***, you dimwitted schmucko.
I think there is so much prejudice in San Francisco and it is mostly directed at communities of color. In many schools in San Francisco the amount of African American kids have been declining year after year. It can make a black family feel like a minority and very left out of this pretty prosperous city. I believe the members on the school board were trying to fight for equity for the communities of color. I have two kids in SFUSD and seeing so little African American kids in the district is very sad and made me think what is it like for those kids that are so much in the minority. This city has been very unfair to minorities with the gentrification of many neighborhoods and the exuberant rents. I think those on the school board are fighting for the underdog and finally trying to end some white supremacy practices.
In saying this, if any culture works really hard they should be able to succeed, get ahead and have the American dream.
It is true there has been the most systematic racism towards communities of color and no matter how hard they worked, sometimes because of circumstances it just wasn’t enough. We all know about the Black Lives Matter Movement and what it stands for.
San Francisco is such a beautiful and diverse city. Our schools need to be an opportunity for all races and ethnicities to succeed. We have to think about how different communities learn and the different biases.
There are a lot of hurt people and a lot of hurt communities. There is prejudice here in San Francisco against communities of color and I can understand how the school board would like to see all kids in San Francisco have the same opportunities. I also think that if families work hard and push their kids to work hard to achieve the American dream that is a good thing. I also think it was harder for the black community more than any other community because of systematic racism.
This is all written in love to achieve a more equitable and fair SFUSD. We all should find a common bond to unite like being thankful that COVID rates are declining and our kids will be safe to go back to school soon.
Collins sounds pretty hateful towards Asian-Americans, to be honest. That alone should disqualify her from a public service position. My parents immigrated here from China with very little money and yes, I studied my ass off unlike almost everyone else in my school. In college, other students (rich white kids) called me and my fellow Asian friends “grinds” because we studied every day including weekends, and didn’t party enough. How does studying = white supremacy? It’s in our culture to study hard as a way to get ahead when you don’t have money or connections which is exactly where my family started out in the US. Of course there are Asian-American jerks, just like there are jerks of every other race and ethnicity. But to lump us all into the same group as some teenagers who made fun of some kid in her daughter’s school? Not only is that racist, but woefully ignorant. We should not have a biased, ignorant person representing us.
Have folks forgotten the racist and stereotypical mural Ellen Lee Zhou put up in SF of Mayor London Breed. Zhou was NEVER apologetic, in fact she laughed while giving an interview on this disgusting mural.
To add insult to injury, The Chinese American Alliance sent out a message titled “Comrades don’t stay silent and support San Francisco mayoral candidate Ellen Lee Zhou,” in which it trashed San Francisco and asked for donations and support for her campaign.
According to the group’s website, they have 19,000 registered Chinese members in 41 states across the country. On their website they have articles dating as far back as 2017 and 2018 demeaning individuals benefiting from Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) as immoral and irresponsible people, describing members of the LGBTQ community as “deviant” and invasive to conservative Chinese family values, and even saying that Chinese, along with white people, are victims of affirmative action and arguing that only if African Americans and Hispanic students could humbly learn from the success of the Chinese then they too would reach academic and career success. Really!! THIS IS RACIST coming from Chinese and the Chinese American Alliance. This has been their views, stance and position against Blacks and Latinos for decades. Yet today, they ask Mayor Breed for help and millions of $$$ to fund an program for Asian protection. I ask, where’s the protection for the Black and Latino community. You don’t see Asian children in immigration dog cages and taken and separated from their parents by immigration. All I see are Latino and Afro Latino and children in these dog cages mistreated. During the immigration process and for the record, Blacks and Latinos have NEVER been afforded the privilege of choosing an “American Name” in addition to their legal name.
Has Zhou been forced to resign from any city position or banned from any future political runnings, I think not. Let’s keep it REAL here.
Calling out racism is not racist. Collin’s use of the term “House N*****” is an accurate term when used to describe the position given to Asians in a white dominated society. Asians are “model minorities” which is a euphemism for “house negro”. A “house negro” enjoys all the privileges of working in the masters house and would do anything to keep their position. But at the same time, the house negro status is a precarious one subject to the master’s whims. For instance, if the racist slave owner decides he wants to scapegoat someone for spreading the some “Kung-Flu”, the house negro will conveniently serve as the whipping boy to which the field negros attention will focused upon and away from the master. So the master’s responsibility for the spreading the disease is all but lost in the melee between the field negros and house negro.
The “model minority”” was made official in 1966 by UC Berkeley sociologist William Petersen PhD with articles in Time magazine and US News and World Report comparing “orientals” with “problem minorities” (Black folks like MLK). According to Petersen, if these “problem minorities” would just shut and stop protesting and work hard, they’d be successful like them “orientals”. Like if the field negros would just shut up and concentrate on picking more cotton, someday they might make it working in the house.
Asians need to understand that Collins is not the enemy, She is a friend and ally who pointed out the truth to us. It’s the truth that hurts.
Wonder if you’d be as reasonable in trying to defend a Conservative with comments a lot more ambiguous to interpretation as what Collins said? Or what about a Jew calling out the anti-semitism in BLM protests this past summer. Their foreign policy seems fixated on out of context Middle East history, yet they seem unconcerned with active Black African slavery in Mali, Sudan, Mauritania and, recently, Libya. Not to mention the treatment of the Bantu in Somalia, or conditions in Nigeria, etc. Now it’s on to anti-Asian sentiment, ignoring the facts that Asian students on average put the most hours into study.
i apologize to the readers on my diatribe in response to the comments made by mb. the term “white supremacy” in my opinion, is real only to the perpetrator, self flattery, wishful thinking, no more.
i am thankful that i can voice my opinion without being told to shut up by “know it alls” and “delusional” authorities on issues that concern us all.
i am proud to be an advocate for children, pediatrician, educator. being an
asian american legal refugee,
grateful for parents and educators who lovingly taught virtues of respect of self and others, hard work, frugality, healthy competitiveness, and independence. been blessed with the opportunities afforded me to attain the american dream.
Doctor, I don’t care if you singlehandedly built a sterile, working artificial heart out of three old scarves and the circuit board in a Tickle Me Elmo; if you’re gonna say something as pig-ignorant as ““white supremacy” in my opinion, is real only to the perpetrator”, people are going to call you out on it, and they will be right to do so.
Scholars study these subjects **for their jobs** and they have accepted meanings for terms like “white supremacy.” If you want to talk about race and not sound like the idiot that you’re sounding like right now, you owe it to yourself to familiarize yourself with their work.
Collins intentionally abuses and misuses the term white supremacy. Her narrow academic use of the term is not widely accepted by the broader public and she knows this. The majority of the students in SFUSD are not white. Her inflammatory and divisive rhetoric is intentional. To quote Kierkegaard, “once you label me you negate me”. She is unfit to be on the board and would have been fired from the private sector long ago.
You mean “scholars” like Ibram Kendi and Robin D’Angelo? Sure, if you consider toddler-level illogic and implicitly racist theories “scholarship,” then, yes, our best and brightest are on the case. Should we add you to that list of “scholars” as well?
Look, Bozo, I’m not saying you have to agree with or like the field. Take that shıt to your therapist’s couch; this discussion isn’t about the merits of various CRT ideas.
I *am* saying that if someone is clearly using words the way they’re used in that field, you can’t just go obliviously wandering into a discussion and insisting that they used them with some other definition that’s the only one you, a dilettante, understand, and then whining about it whenever somebody correctly points out that you literally do not know what you are talking about.
No, this is dumb. The entire reason I brought this up in the context of this discussion is that people are getting the vapors over Collins’s use of “white supremacy”, and then responding to her as if Collins had meant THE COMPLETELY DIFFERENT DEFINITION that happens to be the only one they are familiar with. It doesn’t matter if CRT is the greatest academic field ever devised or pseudointellectual trash; if what you are trying to do is formulate a coherent response to the ideas that Alison Collins actually meant, you need to, y’know, not grossly misunderstand the ideas that Alison Collins actually meant. And that means having a basic understanding of the terms used by CRT so you can have an intelligent discussion about them, not bloviating away because you can’t be bothered to absorb the actual perspectives of the people whose texts you’re angrily “responding” to.
Isn’t that the point? You’re suggesting that these terms have universal definitions that are widely accepted by “scholars.” I’m saying that the “scholars” defining this “field” aren’t actually scholars, and ipso facto, neither you nor anyone else can say that we’ve defined any of these terms in a way that has been accepted universally. Yeah, sure, the CRT crowd accepts these definitions; but, not the rest of the 99.9% of us who see through this.
* Your academic privilege is showing.
“Sorry, you simply do not understand these terms as they are used by people who think about and discuss race as a living,”
Thank you for acknowledging that CRT is a (profitable) industry.
Dial down the very palpable contempt, your academic privileged is showing.
“If you are not careful, the newspaper will have you hating the people who are being oppressed and loving the people who are doing the oppressing” – Malcolm X (700*414)
mb ‘s comments only reflect his/her ignorance, arrogance and stupidity. telling me to read more books or stop commenting. i will not be silenced by people like YOU!
have more self respect!!
i have an M.D. after my name.
what do you have? why dont you work harder in life instead of
shaming yourself?
Look at all the time and energy being spent on Collins, rather than on the students. There is still no plan to bring back older students, the District will forfeit close to $20M because of it, and Collins is more concerned with herself than with educating the students.
I find it intriguing that I haven’t seen a simple point anywhere. As we all know, and you wrote about so well, the list of 44 had some rather dubious additions. It didn’t take much to get on that list, even if the action didn’t actually happen. But Collins was/is a major and vocal proponent of that process and the concept. Her tweets, no matter what she actually meant, would seem to fit perfectly in the criteria of those 44. And the fact it happened two years before she was elected would seem to be no different than James Lick’s foundation giving money to build a racist sculpture 18 years after he died. Actually, I’d argue that the James Lick issue is less problematic – 18 years after dying is a lot less of a problem than two years before getting elected.
Mr. Lauter,
Your mother was the founder of AIPAC, no?
She read everything I wrote.
Showed up at a Gonzalez office monthly party and told me I should write less.
I’d quoted this from 15 Samuel:
“Now go and smite Am’alek and utterly destroy all that they have; do not spare them, but kill both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass.”
That was the prophet, Samuel giving marching orders to Israel’s first king, Saul.
Sounds like genocide to me.
And?
Saul spares Am’alek and some sheep and the like and God rebukes him:
“I repent that I have made Saul king.”
Cause, Saul wasn’t murderous enough for the God of Israel.
Surprised the Big Guy didn’t show up at Safeway with a Recall petition.
To say I got (and, still do) a ton of crap for quoting those verses from the Oxford Revised Standard Version …
well, let’s just say my life was threatened.
I’m told the idea of killing me was broached at an SFSOS meeting.
Hey, my parents were fundamentalist Pentacostal hillbillies and they taught us kids everything but fear.
That could be the reason I was the only person in town to publish the Mohammed Cartoons (which I thought were dull).
So, they didn’t kill me and settled for taking control of the SF Sentinel and banning me.
Ahhh, Earth is a great place to be a writer of my ilk.
War, famine, pestilence, bigotry, Trump.
And, of course, SFUSD drama.
Giants start the 2021 season tonite.
h.
Sam Lauter was former SF AIPAC chief and has been a corporate lobbyist and campaign consultant for candidates and measures that that repeatedly and successfully targeted Black and brown communities in San Francisco for exploitation by conservative Democrats on behalf of their speculator clients for decades.
AIPAC is the America Israel Public Affairs Committee that is the lobbying arm of the Israeli government in the US. In a sense, our tax dollars subsidize Israel’s public diplomacy directed at US taxpayers.
Much of AIPAC’s work involves whitewashing Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestine in support of the Israeli government’s campaign of dehumanizing those there before them.
Interesting how Lauter echoes the Israeli disdain for existing populations and their ongoing oppression with his support of local relatively recent (compared to Blacks) migrants by choice and their descendants over the descendants of chattel slaves who capitalized the nation and have been consistently, summarily disenfranchised.
When I met with Lauter about a decade ago after he read some posts of mine less than supportive of Israel, he invited me to coffee. I took him up on it and got a Blue Bottle siphon. Our meeting ended when I said, “Sam, were Israel not committing crimes, there would be no need for AIPAC. AIPAC’s magnitude is indicative of the scale of the crimes.”
I wonder if Sam is on the clock here.
In any other jurisdiction, Republicans.
I’m not any of those things, nor am I a Republican, and I agree with him…did you look at the research they did? I looked forward to learning more about some of the obscure names (and fully agreed with renaming the most high-profile problematic names). I expected at least a few paragraphs at the level of scholarship my 9th grader is using in his English assignments. When I saw the Google sheet with Wikipedia sources and not much explanation, I was horrified. And then, it’s defended unapologetically by Collins and the rest of the Board, and said historical context, nuance were not going to used in the judgements. It makes you question if public school will teach your kids to learn to write or to think critically?
Just imagine if she were a Trump supporting conservative. She would have already been cancelled by the Woke Wave.
I’m a African American and I am thankful I do not have any of my four children enrolled in the SFUSD! Is this the San Francisco school board leadership!
It is obvious Alison Collins is racist toward Asian’s and need to be removed immediately! She is a poor example of the school board and towards the Asian community. Anyone defending and accepting this type of behavior and standing behind her ( Gabriela López) must be removed!
Thank you Randy Cameron for standing in solidarity with those who were harmed by Commissioner Collins’ words.
The Lowell hot mic incident back in October where she called those in attendance “racist” is just one of many examples where Collins has used inflammatory language. Her part in the renaming of the schools fiasco demonstrates how completely out of touch she is. We need advocates for our kids and not someone who’s devoted to scapegoating others.
Collins is doing real harm to
Thousands of families.
It is cowardly to make excuses
For her, to pander and hope
She’ll be more honorable and
Less hateful, less bigoted.
The mayor has the power to
Remove her from the board.
Anyone whose family has migrated to the US of its own volition, either as refugee or migrant, me included, should not expect a risk free experience as we benefit economically from an economy originally capitalized on slavery. The outraged creditors are demanding payment on that mushrooming debt and until they get paid, nobody should expect an easy ride.
Had there been higher profile solidarity between Asians and Blacks on issues of shared experience of racist oppression, then we might not be here. But instead of solidarity, this was the highest profile response by Chinese American parents to Black families at SFUSD:
https://repository.uchastings.edu/faculty_scholarship/395/
The systems and structures of power, the institutions that combine to reinforce white supremacy, have long controlled and enforced the constructed definition of whiteness. At first, white was northern and western European immigrants of Protestant and Catholic descent. Once demographic changes threatened to upend the deal, southern Europeans and other Catholics were incorporated into the what were becoming the ever expanding circles of whiteness.
After WWII, Jews were deemed to be fully white. And as the Black and brown populations threatened to politically overwhelm white supremacy, Asians began to be included in the functional definition of white under the model minority myth in the 80/90s while the door was slammed shut by the aging white former majority on the emerging rainbow minority here in CA via Prop 13 with implications for public schools.
Incorporation as white by power does not mean that one is exempt from discrimination by the weak. That’s my interpretation of the history of the approach of systems and structures of power to stewarding white supremacy. (I’d imagine Asians in the US get more consideration from power than a Black, brown or white US person would get in Han China.)
I’ve not been a fan of Collins. Her performance of neoliberal identity politics has been coarse and crude, originating from an ill-educated place, as this author has noted in previous reportage. Aside from the most unredeemably racist name changes, we’ve seen Collins focused on therapy for SFUSD students, to signal Board support and shield them from pain, but which does little to stop the reproduction of white supremacy. Kids should not be abused but must be prepared to handle a world full of pain. But that has no bearing on the larger systems and structures of power at play in this regard. Collins simply, to use a grotesquely appropriate metaphor, gave her opportunistic opponents enough rope.
The right wing in San Francisco is rampaging full spectrum, YIMBY, schools, DA, while the passive progressives are busied selling out the citizenry for their nonprofits, screwing grass movement progressive left movements, and parsing faux pas in political class court discourse.
addendum to my earlier post:
Respect yourself, courtesy of the Staple Singers
“white supremacy”, what white
supremacy?
We Asians/Asian Americans do not see ourselves as inferior or superior to other races, nor should any other nationality, race, color, creed, age or gender.
we are only different, and thankfully so. beauty in diversity, just learn to coexist
Sorry, you simply do not understand these terms as they are used by people who think about and discuss race as a living, and should either read some books about the subject so you know what you’re talking about or stop commenting.
Collins’s generalizations were clumsily phrased and overbroad, but her basic points are completely sound – and backed by data from AAPI researchers who have studied attitudes about race in AAPI communities. MOST Asians and Asian-Americans do not harbor anti-black prejudices, but there absolutely substantial numbers who do, and it is not a stretch to believe that a larger number may have internalized more subtle, subconscious biases (this is true of every other group that has immigrated to the US over the last 200 years, so, so Asian-Americans would be a remarkable exception if they didn’t).
It is trivially easy to find evidence that these biases exist – I don’t even have to leave any of the comment threads discussing Collins’s tweets to find it! Go through ten anti-Collins comments and you’ll inevitably find one with the sentiment “Collins is just jealous because Asians are successful because they work hard.” The obvious subtext is that the commenter believes that the reason black Americans are less socioeconomically successful is that they, as a group, are lazy.
Chinese American parents in the 1990s were so race aware that they filed a lawsuit to upend the desegregation consent decree for “neighborhood schools” just as they are raging in favor of performance segregation to elite schools that are not neighborhood schools.
One might understand how under current circumstances, that racist history might be downplayed while all responsibility for anything wrong cast, again, on Black and Brown commissioners and the students they represent by conservative Asian American west side families.
When conservatives play race politics, they do so awkwardly and clumsily. Sadly, neoliberal, identity politics as practiced these days offered up a political target that conservatives could not decline to engage on.
MB, you can’t just get offended when anyone discusses work and accuse them of thinking blacks are lazy. You have to use the scientific method. Research shows 60% of Asian American kids start Kindergarten knowing to read. 16% of whites do, in CA. That shows Asian kids are 4x as likely to have parents who made a sacrifice of several hundred hours. Asian kids study an average of 13.8 hours a week and study summers. White kids, 5.6. Therefore Asian kids are harder working and whites lazier on average. Black kids study less than whites, are 4 years behind in reading by 12th grade, 5 behind Asians, and parents are less likely to teach the kids to read. This isn’t due to poverty. More black men abandon their kids or don’t marry before the kid is born. That’s lazy. Diligent is to stay married even if it hurts because that’s what hard-working parents do, put their children ahead of themselves and teach kids to read. Lazier parents and kids embrace the easier, more fun choices. Hanging out, TV, video games, social media, conversations, etc. To get offended at the concept someone is calling black kids lazy, the black community has to radically transform and stay married as much as Asians, marry before having kids, save, pool resources, and spend as many hours studying. If you study equal hours, you can claim you are no lazier. If you choose to relax, you are more lazy. If one subgroup on average studies more, they are less lazy. Nigerian Americans, and most African immigrants, are less lazy than whites in school and parenting. Many whites are very lazy. But black kids study fewer hours. Go to a library on San Bruno Avenue or Geneva and Mission and see how many Asian kids are there on a weekend, in the Summer. That’s factual diligence. Not being there, if one is relaxing, is factual laziness. Every poor person will only get ahead by denouncing laziness and embracing effort. That’s not racism to note. It’s racism not to note. Blacks can be poorer for any of 3 reasons. 1 is Racism in society, which is a theory insulting to whites and unfair, as antiracism is literally our national religion and any white person acting racist is targeted for destruction and hated by nearly all other whites. And the success of Africans and Asians proves whites aren’t racist. 2. Genetics. This was Eugenics and most scientists believe all races have roughly equal average IQs, though the IQ may be higher for groups who say no to alcohol and drugs, and some IQ is environmental, the genetic potential for IQ is equal, and Nigerian Immigrants show higher than average white IQs, so this theory is false. If black women avoid drugs and wait to marry before having kids and eat well, and teach their kids with spare time, this will be equal. Theory #3 is effort. It is clear Asians and Nigerians make more effort than black kids on a daily basis, and much is by choice. The far left has tried to minimalize this but it is a moral imperative. They call the achievement gap the opportunity gap. It’s not. Most black parents don’t believe kids should make the tremendous sacrifices necessary to get into Lowell under the old system, do whatever it takes to get all As, say no to fun, to church, to TV, to family time, to friend time, to video games, to sports, to social media, to get better grades. Most Asian parents do, or at least a higher percentage. So don’t get offended at the implication on average Asian kids try harder in school. It’s a fact. Instead read ‘Triple Package’ and try to convince black kids to do what Asian and Nigerian kids do and pattern their childhood after them because it guarantees high income because America is fair and will embrace them and compensate them for their skills if they do.
You said it- most asian americans do not harbor anti-black feelings. So Allison Collins was way out of line.
And studying hard to get ahead in society is not ‘white supremacist thinking’. Allison Collins is confirming the very worst stereotypes about black people- that they will drag down anyone who does well in school with the ‘acting white’ label.
Thanks for the great article. Here’s the latest: Lam and Moliga “will introduce a resolution on Thursday calling for fellow member Alison Collins to be removed as vice president and stripped of all of her committee assignments.”
Can someone please clarify if they have the power to do this? Or is this move just to place more pressure on Collins to resign?
I thought a member of the board has to resign or be recalled (which requires 70k signatures, pen on paper).
Both are true. They can’t remove her (as in impeachment), but they are within the rules to remove her as vice chair of the Board and to remove her from all committee assignments.
This is the classic parable of one’s chickens coming home to roost. It is obvious to me that Collins used these tweets to rile Asian hate to her advantage in subsets of the African American community to get herself elected. Sadly, this is politics 101 today in our divided society.
While her views may be different, her tactics are ironically the same as Trump. This brings up another parable of the pot calling the kettle black.
One final parable, as the emperor has now been revealed as wearing no clothes.
All of this is super messy and a part of the whitelash that comes from trying to make systemic change. Parents who feel entitled to a private school education paid for by tax payers are behind this push to recall Collins and other BOE members. That being said, when running for office, isn’t purging one’s social media pro forma? Very amateurish. She’ll never survive a recall effort now. Well played right winged SF parents and Madame Mayor. Well played.
Collins herself sends her kids to Ruth Asawa SOTA, which also has selective admissions. And furthermore, SOTA’s student body is 37% white, vs 11% for te district as a whole. So white students are 3X overrepresented at SOTA. Has Collins made one peep about that ‘private school at taxpayers’ expense’? Nope. Not one peep. She only goes after the asian-heavy school.
Have you made one peep about the racist SOTA?
Respectfully disagree with your view. Parents are not looking for a private school education paid for by taxpayers. Rather, parents want to have their children rewarded for excelling in school. Having someone on a school board telling her charges (the students) that hard work (merit) has no place in San Francisco is completely opposite of what you want educators to say.
Perhaps Ms. Collins and the rest of the Board of Education would serve their charges better by improving the educational experience for all of San Francisco’s 57,000 public school students and try to bring that level up to Lowell’s standards rather than bringing Lowell down to the same level as the rest of the system.
Totally agree with Steve. What does S.F. get by effectively getting rid of its nationally renowned public college prep school. It is the path for academically-oriented low and middle income kids to get into a top college. If you want more diversity at Lowell, you should focus on the elementary schools to make sure all kids get the same opportunities and levels of education. Both my parents graduated from Lowell and went on to Berkeley. My mom was a poor Chinese immigrant and my dad was was a poor working class White kid. Both were 1st in their families to go to college. Probably wouldn’t have been possible without Lowell.
That is no more possible in the medium run than it is for any of the “miracle” charter schools you hear about to magically replicate themselves and scale. Like those schools, Lowell performs so well because it’s creaming – it’s not high-performing because its standards are exceptionally high, it’s high-performing because it’s skimming the highest-scoring students in the city off the top . It’s not unreasonable on its face to question whether this is a system that makes sense from the perspective of how to allocate resources across every student in the district.
Actually, Medium, your comment is uninformed. Please do not paint all Lowell students and families with a broad and inaccurate generalizations for which you have no evidence.
Lowell students have been recognized for their achievement because they work hard for them. This is not prestige based on skimming. Please do not denigrate the hard work that dedicated teachers, staff, and administrators at Lowell have put in to creating a learning environment at Lowell that meets hard working students where they are and shows them how far their aspirations and hard work can lead them. Do not denigrate the curiosity, dedication, assiduous work ethic, talent of these Lowell students. They earned the accolades they get. Please do not underestimate how much these students support and encourage each other to learn, to study hard and to achieve academically – more than they realize themselves. Do not dismiss the multiple jobs and sacrifices that many immigrant or poor families make to send their kids to Lowell. Do not assume that all these families – if students are lucky enough to have families – are leveraging privilege to just get a private school education on taxpayer dollars. By the way they are also taxpayers. This is not skimming.
You assert this as if it were absolute fact. Intuitively, it sounds like it could be true. What does the data say?
Lots of other countries with renowned education systems do not aggressively sort their students at the primary/secondary level like this; they wait for university exams to do that. Presumably, they have reasons for arranging their systems like this. I can think of one obvious potential benefit **even to the highest-performing students** of having to share some classes with the bottom 95%: that there are learning opportunities for them that might compensate for maybe missing out on cramming in that extra chapter of the chemistry textbook in June. Maybe they learn the valuable skill of mentoring their more-average classmates, and maybe this experience also affords more opportunities for them to thoroughly master the material themselves.
For students who are high performing, there is an absolute benefit to being in classes with other high performing students, where the teachers do not need to stop and slow down to bring along the other students who are not at the same level. For teachers too, it is a different type of teaching when all of the kids can keep up, or when some need additional help even just to start. I have heard this from teachers (at other schools). Isn’t there an obligation to provide an excellent education that meets all the students where they are, the ones who struggle and the ones who are ahead?
I’m not denigrating them; you just appear unable to read the plain meanings of words rather than invent your own tortured and fictionalized version of what they say.
I am sure Lowell students are very bright and work very hard. My comment never claimed they weren’t, nor that they didn’t. (Claiming that Lowell or charter schools cream the best students isn’t a knock on the STUDENTS; it’s a knock on the claim that the SCHOOLS are what make these students elite. This is exactly backwards: the students are what make the schools elite!)
Rather, what I am *not* sure of is that Lowell students would not do equally well for themselves in a different system in which Lowell did not exist. Were these students at Lincoln, or Washington, or Balboa, or wherever they would still be the same bright kids they are, and colleges would likely notice them anyway. A very large part of the argument that SF needs a purely merit-based elite magnet high school rests on the assumption that while Lowell students might only negligibly more prepared for college than they would be excelling at Balboa or wherever, the prestige of the Lowell brand is what gets these kids into better colleges than they otherwise would get into. I find this claim very, very unconvincing without much clearer evidence than any rabid parent has supplied so far.
And while the benefits of Lowell to its students beyond the brand are vague, there are likely real costs from the status quo; the education research I’m aware of seems to suggest that it might actually harm the bottom 90-95% of students for a school system to aggressively sort the top 5-10% of kids out of their schools completely. Maybe that’s not really true! I’m open to being convinced with clear, hard data. But even if false, the idea is obviously not *crazy* on its face, and Lowell stans need to stop dismissing the idea out of hand without even engaging with the facts of student outcomes across the entire district.
She blabbers on and on about microaggressions and systemic racism against Black members of our community, while being utterly clueless about her own microaggressions (and systemic racism—ever notice how few of the hardworking students, by whom her children feel threatened and who are denounced as “docile” and not suited for leadership positions, end up in high level positions in the US???) against Asian-American families. She is empowering and encouraging violent hate. She is asking us to police our language while using her ethnic background as excuse to hurt others. She is an arrogant, ignorant hypocrite, and she AND other members of the board of education who are standing by her have no business representing us and ought to resign. All of them.
City College SF has some great classes about the Asian-American history, if they want to learn about why their words and actions are so hurtful and dangerous. I recommend ASAM 20.
Many of my Asian-American friends and family are worried about going out, even after COVID. Collins’ racist hate and her non-apology make a mockery of those very understandable fears. Stereotypes about Asian-American citizens continue to hurt and harm people, both personally and professionally. To not only deny that but to also, when called upon it, double down on it, is despicable. Shame on her, and Shane in anybody who defends her.
She shouldn’t use an anecdote to generalize a whole race. It can be perceived as racism.
Instead of changing how school admissions should go, they need to focus on raising the level of the students to meet the standards. Everyone needs to go through some type of adversity to succeed.
I truly hope the Asian and Black communities can heal their differences and get back to the real issue of the today, fighting off the white devils !
Not sure why when there is a common enemy in white supremacy – people let themselves get played . Black brown yellow people are getting played against each other – get it together people! We are people , right?
I don’t even have kids, but after the school renaming debacle and the fact that schools are still closed after we put teachers at the front of the line for vaccines, I will vote against every incumbent on the ballot. They all need to go. If there are any that have tried to stand up against the majority on these issues, let me know. Otherwise, if you’re new to the board, you have my vote.
Commissioner Jenny Lam has spoken up in support if students’ best interests and us aligned with you on these issues. In this case Commissioner Molina also made his voice heard in asking Collins to resign. The others stood in solidarity with Collins Ann’s these ideologies that do not serve out students or our city.
Viewing this story from New York is interesting. To see so many people on here both for & against Collins for the wrong reason makes me realize how bad this ideology has poisoned your school system. Same thing is happening here.
Collins should indeed step down. Not because of using the N word. Or being an anti-Asian racist. She should step down for being a terrible educator.
Calling merit “white supremacy” is such an inane concept coming from anyone’s mouth. But especially a school administrator.
This ideology wants all excellence to be flattened. White, Asian, Black or other. She wants students to be equally less successful. Which hurts all kids.
Bias & racism are still a problem in our country. Lowing education standards not only does nothing to stop racism. It has nothing to do with racism. (If anything it will increase it, as Willy said above. The rich private schools won’t lower their standards. MIT won’t lower its standards standards. This won’t help “equity” at all).
Step down Alison. Get another line of work. Parents want kids to excel. You don’t.
Despite all of these comments, she isn’t going anywhere. This has awoken the beast and any attempt to run her off the job is going to make things worse.
“Disaster comes by way of the mouth”… Chairman Mao….those are words to live by lol
Whether she resigns or not, the truth remains that there is anti-Asian in the Black community, and anti-Black in the Asian community. Does this represent everyone? Absolutely not. Now, more than ever, both sides need to come together, stand together, listen together, and heal together. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.
I am 100% ready to stand together with black activists. Just not Allison Collins. She has to go.
if there was one instance a daughter would be ashamed of her mom, this was it. alison tried to openly shame her perceived asian enemies/competitors, but it backfired. sorry for the shame she has brought to her children
and family. she ought to teach all children to work hard and have the competitive spirit, and not go through life with an unearned free pass. i hope her
family will do well in life and not be marred by all this shame.
Our many Asian American & Pacific Islander communities are hurt, angry & grieving this week. Those of us who are Asian/Pacific Islander ask that our pain not be used as a wedge to further harm or pit API and Black communities against each other by a racist recall effort. Commissioner Alison Collins has been one of the few consistent anti-racist voices among politicians in this city. Commissioner Collins has been in solidarity with API communities in our school district and done the work in sponsoring resolutions for Art Equity, Equity Studies, and an API student led mental health initiative. She works tirelessly to hold SFUSD accountable in implementing these and other important resolutions including the Vietnamese language pathway and a resolution to audit school libraries and ensure representation of Asian American narratives. The opportunistic targeting of Commissioner Collins distracts from the national conversation around addressing Anti-API and Anti-Black hate. Furthermore, we want to highlight and remember how API and Black communities have historically and are currently working together in solidarity with each other against white racism. We continue to grieve even as we support Commissioner Collins, and we call on all San Francisco leaders to focus on healing and deepening efforts to address systemic racism in our schools
Damn H, dropping the n-word and then telling Collins “you go, girl.” Savage.
This story sounds like it’s gonna be juicy, but doesn’t meet the hype in the end. All those who signed on to Yee’s letter are “sickened”? I’m skeptical.
RL,
“I am not an idiom!
YOU are an idiom!!
Line from a Randy Quaid sit-com.
His asst principal is an Asian immigrant and when he explains that someone was not insulting her, they were just using an ‘idiom’.
She doesn’t understand and get’s angry.
Carter called an era in his presidency as a “great malaise”
This is a period of a ‘Great Need to Hurt’.
People don’t want to just win an argument.
They want to destroy their opposition in every way.
I’ve never seen that before.
Well, except for Dodgers fans, of course.
You know why they bury regular fans 6′ deep but bury Dodgers’ fans 10′ under?
Because, deep down, Dodgers fans are good people.
Once, doing field research at Clemson we were working with a class of students who were morons at best, the genius teacher on site had rigged up a series of motor responses to flash cards to teach work skills.
It was a huge success.
While the students couldn’t read, they could understand pictures and repeat activities.
Hmmm, where was I?
Yeah, so some kind of accident happens to one of the kids.
Nothing, serious … no blood or broken bones but it made the other kids laugh at the student who suffered the mishap.
I was shocked.
Enjoying the misfortune of others seems to cut across many barriers, including intelligence.
So, I shouldn’t be surprised at this backyard fence full of screaming magpies gaining mutual pleasure from hurting someone.
I wonder if that’s an actual genetic rather than learned trait.
And, how long since you seen anyone bunt for a single on a drag down 1st base line?
h.
Well-said. Thanks.
3/4 or more of Black and Brown students in SFUSD can’t pass their state proficiency exams. It’s a crisis and claiming “merit is racist” does nothing to solve it. Collins should go because her ideology – unchanged since her tweets – doesn’t help students to actually get ahead.
No one wants to discuss the fact some races study more and try to fix it by convincing, selling kids on the idea hard work will pay off and it is your moral duty to show your content of character by studying hard, long hours, to be a good and improved person. It’s the elephant in the room. Get study hours equal and income will follow.
Collins must go for the good of SFUSD. There is no nuance or context that excuses calling any group of people hateful slurs. Then to hide behind her daughter, give me a break. Black kids bully Asian kids all the time. Would this justify an Asian parent casting hateful racial slurs at all black students, parents and teachers?
During a Board meeting to discuss Lowell, parents made the case that Lowell offers low income students a path to college that is a benefit to all SF residents. Collins, forgetting to mute said to another board member, “I am listening to a bunch of racists”. If someone thoughtfully disagrees with your position it does not make them a racist. Casting hateful racist language at an entire group does.
The Asian cultural commitment to education predates US History by a millenia or two. It is why Asians are “over represented” at Lowell, not because they seek to align with white supremacists.
By Alison Collins’ standards, historical context doesn’t matter. Unless it applies to her.
Collins rushed the change in Lowell by 8 months because someone, nobody knows whom, said something on a blog that is racist. She called it an incident. She also attacked Lowell because a Pakistani American Senior made a slightly awkward poster. Look at it, it wasn’t a Klan poster, it was a few guys in earrings who were rappers and Obama saying “I don’t talk to Michelle no mo” and no black scientists or authors. She punished thousands of people at Lowell for this. Families studied to get into Lowell the last year of merit as a sophomore and she destroyed them because one person said something wrong on a blog, which puts families in the unreasonable position of helping their kids get all As and also simultaneously having to police every person on the Internet and prevent them from saying anything racist. That’s cruel. She punished thousands of families and openly called them racist for something a couple people they don’t know did. That’s incredibly cruel! She is a terrible person who implemented cruel policies which hurt Asians who worked very hard and sacrificed, and never openly called on blacks she was claiming suffer to study longer hours to match the effort of the Asian Americans who were working hard for that Lowell. She did worse than carjack thousands because a stranger said something. Now she directly said hateful things about Asians implying they are wrong to try hard. She should resign.
So if I don’t call out Trump and if I don’t vote Democrat, then I’m a racist? Where is the logic in that? If I study hard to get ahead, I’m using “white supremist” thinking? How does she draw this conclusion? Did she not take introductory-level college logic? That should be mandatory as an educator. Her statements were very hurtful to me. My family, refugees from Laos, escaped to the US in 1975. My dad worked three jobs and my mom worked two jobs (both went to night school to learn English) to support our family so that the kids could focus on school. We picked fruits in the summer, ironed clothes on the side and cleaned homes on the weekends for extra income. There is no “white supremist” mentality here – just hard work! It paid off; I have a great career (a woman in a technology field! I’m not bragging, I just want people like her to know, I did it because of hard work and not through “white supremist” thinking) and I didn’t have to marry a wealthy white real estate developer to get ahead. Does she not realize that it’s her way of thinking that is causing the divisiveness? Instead calling us house n*****, why doesn’t she focus on education, self improvement and hard work. Why put another race down? By the way, growing up, I have been called racial slurs by Caucasians, Latinos, Middle Easterns, other Asians, and yes, even African Americans? Do I hate all races because a small subset of them said derogatory slurs to me? No. It’s a small subset. I have friends of all races. I believe there are more good than bad in each race. We need to move away from Collins’ way of thinking. She needs to resign.
What your parents did is no big deal so-blacks have been doing that shit for years ………..ok do they escaped from their homeland to come here for a better life from the same people that bombed, murdered and destroyed the infrastructure of Loas,killing babies ,young children,women animals destroyed the forest poisoned the waters , destroyed the rice fields etc,etc but everythings great because you got a little tech job……..you are not concerned about what Ms Collins said you’re just jumping on the white band wagon of hate
Here’s how you can summarize this story and most of the comments:
Please, Allison, please, please, just apologize for making (not) racist remarks. Your fellow antiracists are desperate not to have to call you out. In fact, we’ll do anything to justify and overlook your (not) racist remarks.
Imagine if this had been said by some white person. The complete and utter hypocrisy and morally bankrupt relativism of the “antiracist” movement is on full display here.
Her statement is racist because she made negative generalizations (anti-Black) about a race (Asians) based on personal anecdotes (her friend’s feelings and an incident her daughter witnessed). Replace words in the brackets with any other minority and stereotype and I’m not sure that there will be so apologists trying to legitimize the idea. To me, it doesn’t matter which words she used or if there was name calling because the semantic content of her tweets is racist. If we want to talk about harm, accusations of racism and white supremacy today in a place like SF is a far more harmful characterization than traditional racial stereotypes that would conceivably spark far more outrage. That shouldn’t stop anyone from calling it out where it does exist, but the essential point here is that she implicated an entire community in this harmful characterization based solely on their race. To anyone who argues that this is ok because it *might* be true (on the basis of personal anecdotes) – I refer to an earlier commenter who pointed out that this is exactly how racists justify racism.
There is no place for racism on the school board. As a Mom of Asian kids in the school system I can no longer trust Collins’ decisions on their behalf. I don’t think she has the kids best interests in her heart and she certainly does not model good behavior. If my kids posted what she posted I’d be horrified …
I remember once asking someone who was herding the crazy cats running a SF non-profit how in god’s name she could tolerate the opportunistic hateful bile leveled at anyone who dared not tow their SF Gestapogressive party line — resorting often to disparagement of their race, gender, and sexuality. Namely that one’s race gender and sexuality only counted if they were in ideological lockstep. Otherwise they were used to attack — and brazenly. Like something out of a Hollywood parody about hillbullies. She said simply (and I will never forget it because it keeps being so true) “well, you know they’re really rather stupid, and that always catches up to them.”
Collins needs to go. This is further underscored by her terrible attempts at explaining why her comments were “no big deal”. SMH. Awful person, awful statements.
Agreed.
When Allison Collins ran for School Board in 2018, there was also a candidate named Josephine Zhao. Despite her explicitly anti-transgender advocacy (in 2013 Zhao advocated against gender-neutral bathrooms in San Francisco schools) , Mayor London Breed and state Senator Scott Wiener were proud to endorse her and support her candidacy.
Did it matter then and does it matter now, that these two elected officials could “overlook” Zhao’s transphobic remarks?
It’s also interesting that the defenders of the murals at Washington High are so insistent that they should stay because a slave-owner wasn’t really a racist. And those who oppose renaming schools have made it a core tenet of their defensive position that no one is perfect, no historical subject is without fault. They quickly follow that up with something along the lines of, on balance so and so wasn’t such a bad person.
Maybe Commissioner Collins deserves the same opportunity be given credit for what she has done and to work with others to learn from past mistakes. Time is beyond up for Washington, Lincoln and all the troubling individuals after whom some SFUSD schools are named. Collins is still alive and could actually make amends for past harm, unlike the guy who’s standing on the dead Indian in that apparently progressive mural inside Washington High.
OK, if you want restoration, here’s what Collins can do.
1. Read Triple Package.
2. Urge all African American kids to admire and learn from the sacrifice of 10,000 hours over a childhood Asian Americans make over whites, and do make any sacrifice to emulate them and study those hours to eliminate poverty.
3. Call for the arrest of those who destroyed the statues in Golden Gate Park and spraypainted ‘Kill Whitey’, and help police track them down and make a citizen’s arrest (I am 90% sure the person who did this was white, but whatever race they are they should do 10 years in prison for destroying those statues).
4. Spend 100 hours meeting with Nigerian American and Asian American families who have gotten kids into Cal despite poverty. Listen. Learn from them.
5. Acknowledge the vast majority of violence against Asians in San Francisco and Oakland has come from the African American minority, and stop blaming Trump voters for all anti-Asian violence. Maybe the guy in Georgia liked Trump, and there are whites who attack Asians, but most here are black, so acknowledge that. Never blame Trump voters without hard evidence. It’s simplistic and wrong.
6. Spend one hour listening to Thomas Sowell and learning habits.
7. Spend one hour listening to Amy Chua and learning habits.
8. Spend 5 hours meeting with Geoffrey Canada and learning why charter schools, which don’t support the union, get great results for black kids thriving in school and exiting poverty.
9. Vote to reverse making Lowell a lottery which punished many families who had worked very hard to prep their kids to gain admission to an elite school.
10. Vote to restore 8th grade algebra.
11. Vote to stop renaming.
12. Pledge to care about kids as much as union reps or more in all policy.
If she does all this, that’s restorative justice.
She won’t do this because she is extremely narrow minded and hateful.
But if she does, I will not call for her to resign.
Josephine Zhao apologized and dropped out after her comments were reported. It’s time for Allison Collins to do the same.
Also- the opposition to renaming schools is not ‘nobody is perfect’. It is that we cannot judge a historical person using today’s standards. Allison Collins is not a historical person. She made her racist comments in 2016, not 1916. Stop with the excuses. She needs to go.
Is Dianne Feinstein an historical person or a living human being? She has a school named after her, and she is far from perfect.
When she was mayor of SF, she vetoed Harry Britt’s domestic partnership legislation. In all of her years as an elected official, she has never ridden in the Pride parade. I think there are legitimate questions about that – now, while she’s still alive.
Feinstein is being “cancelled” and the school name will be removed. She was not afforded any “context” or “nuance” in the judgement, nor is she getting any a”restorative justice,” all of which Collins is asking for for herself. These are the new standards she and the others have set; time to live by them.
Feinstein has been ‘cancelled’ already. The school named after her is on the list of the 44 schools to be renamed.
Are you now OK to go ahead with cancelling Allison Collins? Or do you have more excuses and ‘whatabouts’?
According to Zhao, she took herself out of the running. In essence she RESIGNED when her anti-trans policies came to light. She took responsibility and stepped down, which is something Collins is refusing to do… I don’t see the comparison here.
I was less referring to Zhao’s position than I was pointing out that elected officials, including Breed and Wiener, were steadfast in their support of her.
Have you seen Collins’ face? She’s unapologetic and she probably doesn’t want another chance. If you participate in one of the public schools board meetings, you will know she gave no one a chance. She make it clear and loud that she’s a racist and prefers some race and not all. She make it clear some deserved help and others do not. She was given many chances and she doesn’t have a damn in our meetings. Can you help a person who doesn’t want to be helped? If she’s not racist, I don’t know who is.
Wow those murals from George Washington high school in the linked article are like something out of the show Parks and Recreation. I’m not saying American history should be covered up or ignored, but is this the kind of art you would want to hang in your own home? Seems like whoever is fighting to keep them up is forgetting this is the place where kids are SUPPOSED to spend 7-8 hours a days 5 a week. Lining the walls of the schools with dark, somewhat depressing and ominous art doesn’t really seems to fit. It fits the narrative of “school sucks” because they are surrounded by historical situations that suck, every day. Keep this sort of stuff in museums or cultural centers, not places extended consistent work/ education.
I agree with your conclusion. In a vacuum, her 2016 tweets could have been excused if she had showed genuine remorse for her behavior. They were clearly dug up by people with an agenda looking for a knife to grind. But her response (including her non-apology Medium post) has been tone-deaf at best and actively spiteful at worst.
As a third generation Korean-American born in Michigan, I understand that there is context behind statements like these, like the Malcolm X parable that Jim posted above. However, what people accusing Asians of anti blackness fail to realize is that there is context on the other side of the equation too, whether that’s seeing mobs during the Rodney King riots target Asian stores for the crimes of a white judicial system or the day-to-day casual aggression from our neighbors.
I hope that we can move on from this saga as a city. One woman should not stand in the way of solidarity, and Alison Collins needs to recognize that and resign.
Joe,
I react to this as a lifelong serious reader and writer.
I want to know what really happened when I read a period account and the best way to do that is to be given that account in the language and understanding of the period of that account.
Y’all got that?
Ever have one of those times where you forget what it was you were looking for when you got up but that it was really important that you write it down but by the time you find something to write with you’ve forgotten this importnt/juicy/sclerotic thought.
So, you keep looking.
Can you readers believe teacher Joe used the word ‘sclerotic’ in succeeding pieces?
Bet that’s on the year-end spelling test.
So, where was I before I went for another gummie?
Yeah, languages are dynamic things and they grow and contract both naturally and by the intentional influence of various groups for various reasons.
This thing with Commissioner Collins’ use of the words current at the time to describe in the most understandable format …
This ‘Censorship’ thing.
Is to encourage the destruction of the repetition of colloquial words and phrases which best convey the tone, manner and relationship are most effectively conveyed.
By Gawd, man, it’s an attack upon Prince Harry’s tongue!!!
Or, something like that.
Put in another way:
Collins has been judged guilty of using currently non-PC correlatives in her vernacular. Again, ‘colloquial speech’ as it were.
People like this took ‘Tom Sawyer’ out of school libraries.
This ‘Censorship/cancel/Culture’ weakens a language in my opinion which is generally speaking, my favorite.
It all comes down to what T.S. Eliot called: ‘Objective Correlative’ which is the writer’s tool in choosing the most accurate word or phrase to capture a person, place or thing or event …
I close with the immortal words of Joseph Heller’s Chief White Half-Oat:
“Prejudice is a terrible thing, Yossarian.”
Yossarian agrees.
The huge chief continues:
“To treat myself, a full-blooded American Indian like some nigger or kike or wop.”
I imagine ‘Catch-22 is in few of the libraries of the anti-Collins group.
You go, girl, I’m an old english teacher and I support your use of our language.
Go Giants!
h.
This makes sense?
Sorry, Mark,
I was ‘chasing rabbits’ there.
I see the Berniecrats are opposed to the call for resignation.
Go Giants!
h.
When Commissioners Collins and Lopez were receiving death threats because of their positions on Lowell High School, there was a stunning silence from SF’s current or former elected Asian American officials. At a press conference denouncing the threats, there was no Jenny Lam, no Norman Yee, no Phil Ting, no David Chiu, no Sandra Fewer, no Jane Kim. Commissioner Faauuga Moliga was present.
I believe that was in part because the proposed changes to the Lowell admission procedures were viewed as an attack on the “over-representation” of Asians at that school. In the mid to late 1980s (as well as before and since), the UC system, especially UC Berkeley, experienced a similar concern about the “over-representation” of Asians. The silence and absence of Asian American elected officials when Collins and Lopez were being targeted is not a way to move toward a fair, just and equitable society, regardless of anyone’s position on or disagreements about certain or even many policy proposal.
Solidarity is complex, difficult to achieve, and easily broken. In a city where elected officials actually have been assassinated, there is no place for hiding or keeping silent when someone makes death threats against a public person.
Changing Lowell this much ruined it. There’s nothing meaningful about Lowell. if D students get in. It used to be you needed all As, which requires a very moral upbringing, very focused hard work from the child and good leadership from parents. 30% could at least get all Bs, which means they are trying hard but maybe not working as hard as they could be, but were at least a decent human being and student. Therefore you had #2 % in the world in passing AP Tests, which takes tremendous work and morality. The far left keeps saying people who want merit think blacks aren’t smart or can’t learn. Nothing could be further from the truth. Blacks, like everyone else, have a chance to prove they can learn and are smart and are morally willing to undergo the extreme sacrifice to prove they want to work as much as other kids, many Asian, who work very, very hard, who choose long hours of study over TV, video games, social media, hanging out. Girls choose right more than boys. It’s a sacrifice. Blacks have every opportunity to prove as an individual they want to learn by sacrificing those hours. What the far left is saying is that no one should have to sacrifice to get ahead, that it’s owed to people based on past sins. So what happens? Those with 40k or 50k a year per kid get elite high schools, but 35% of Lowell on Free Lunch don’t. This takes away a vehicle of class mobility to help people who didn’t try, and it won’t help them, because you just lower standards. When they got rid of 8th grade algebra in SFUSD 7 years ago the big claim was it would help black and Latino kids by not making them feel bad. Test scores show this move didn’t help black kids do better, but it did hurt white and Asian kids. It was a lie. The goal of these people like Collins and Lopez is to destroy what America stands for. Collins and Lopez destroyed what families had worked thousands of hours to earn, for everyone, out of spite for those who work hard, out of a belief all minorities shouldn’t try to assimilate and learn but instead should work together to create a socialist utopia. That’s why they never urge black and Latino kids to study long hours, work summers, go to tutoring at the libraries, and focus obsessively on grades. That would strengthen America, and Collins and Lopez want to bring America down.
The racial breakdown of Lowell High School, ranked among the top 60 high schools in the nation by US News & World Report, does not reflect the actual makeup of the district by race. Yes, while Asians are only 2 out of 5 students in the district, Lowell is almost 3/5 Asian American.
However, there has always been controversy surrounding merit-based admissions in that school. Students of Japanese ancestry can score less than someone of Chinese ancestry. This distinction by ethnicity is bizarre to me.
However, if merit-based admissions is dropped, will this lower the prestige of this public high school? I mean this high school is in the company of expensive, independent high schools.
Everyone takes the same test to get into Lowell. There is no different standard for Japanese American vs Chinese American. It is the fairest and purest form of meritocracy there is.
By the way, the school that Collins sends her daughters to- Ruth Asawa School of the Arts – admits students by ‘auditions’. That school is 37% white. Overall white students make up 11% of the high school age student body. So white students are 3X overrepresented at SOTA. Did Collins ever make one peep about that school’s racist admissions policy? Nope. Not one peep. I wonder why.
Check the tweets again! The death threats were sent to an account called SFGAL8, not Collins and Lopez. You and others are reacting to a comment that wasn’t even meant for them lol There’s no excuse for discrimination and being a racist! Even if she was a victim in the past, it doesn’t give her anymore right to hurt others. Her hate must stop, our community is hurt. We had enough of being the scapegoats. Acknowledge and change, not discriminate and unapologetic. Collins must resign!
I don’t waste my time twittering, so I never saw an twitted death threats. I saw emails.
So you’re telling me all the other elected officials who showed up at the press conference denouncing the death threats were duped because there weren’t really any death threats made against Collins and Lopez? That just sounds weird.
Lam was there to support. You are spreading lies. Don’t be so lazy. Look it up before you tweet.
I appreciate the nuance you showed here. Collins’ first number of tweets were totally legit – maybe controversial in some eyes, but important to find Asian-Am allies and to call out anti Black behaviors. but the fact that she veered into labeling and name calling seemed gratuitous. And her response to the revelations are amazingly tone deaf. How do we have a school board that is so politically UNsavvy? Are they blinded by their righteousness that they can’t read the room at all? I supported the intent behind the renaming, but they bungled the politics in a ridiculous step-on-rake way. This is just more evidence they need to come out of their cloistered bubbles and actually listen to people.
Because she doesn’t think poor kids should study more hours. The only way out of poverty is a better work ethic and more support, like tutors, to decrease the achievement gap. She calls it the opportunity gap. That’s a sign she doesn’t respect achievement, and as poor Asians achieve more in school tests than middle income whites, as do Nigerian immigrants, it’s also a sign she doesn’t respect Asians for their achievements. The reason she should resign is her advice keeps black kids down. Black kids will attain equality by not having resentment, putting their heads down and working very, very hard. Nigerians prove that. If whites are caught being racist, by all means prosecute them, but to claim all whites are racist without proof and to destroy Lowell is indefensible.
Why do you use more racist stereotypes to counter act someone else using racist stereotypes? People need to stop making generalizations about large groups of people based on their skin color or nationality. Full stop.
No, we don’t. You learn about success by behavior. Scientifically, if one group behaves differently and achieves success, their behavior is likely a cause of their success and other groups could emulate it. If America prevents blacks from succeeding due to racism, you wouldn’t see incredible success from African immigrants who believe they control their destiny. Many blacks teach their kids that America being the land of opportunity is just a bunch of bullshit, but the experience of Asian and Nigerian Americans proves it’s not bullshit, and if we can convince blacks to behave better (study 15-20 hours a week, work full time, pay attention in class, learn proper grammar, don’t have kids before marriage, don’t do drugs, save and don’t blow money, do workbooks and flashcards summers), then the poverty of African Americans will soon be over, because whites are not discriminating against them. You need to consider group behavior, even knowing there are exceptions, to understand why things are the way they are. You can’t do that if you don’t notice. There’s more than a standard deviation between blacks and African and Asian immigrants in study hours per week, and black and Asian immigrants have virtually eliminated everything we complain about black people experiencing, homelessness, prison, being killed by police, being killed by criminals, murder, extreme multi-generational poverty, lifetime of minimum wage, etc. The goal should be to convince African Americans to view their journey like immigrants and focus on personal choices and behavior, based on this fact, because America is fair. If America is unfair and racist, the goal is to destroy it and start over. Many whites are suffering also, mostly due to poor choices and behavior. The goal should also be to get those whites to study more hours, marry, save, etc. America is a great nation most want to move to and a land of opportunity in the present. Hard work, deferred gratification, obsession with grades and test scores, saving, marriage, focus on child development all work. Immigrants prove that. If you take away the ability to consider ethnic groups, you don’t notice that and are back to just saying some individuals are unique, everyone be their own star. It’s inconceivable that many Nigerians, Jews, Mormons, Chinese, Indians, Koreans, Lebanese, Persians etc. as mentioned in Triple Package would be unique, so the goal is to get all Americans to behave more like all those groups and change their core beliefs, patriotism, work ethic and decisions. Lowell gave a reward for hard work. Taking away rewards will hurt our GDP and our nation.
Eliminating merit or performance based admissions means that the schools do not want the kids to perform!
The rest of the world (I am European of Asian descent) is laughing that this debate is even happening in America. If you do not want your children to be competitive on the world stage, please go ahead, the rest of the world benefits from less American competition!
I will give you an example: Lets take a sport like volleyball and pretend that Americans wished to transform the sport to be more inclusive and diverse by eliminating merit based admissions (no need to count the scores, it will make the kids who are not good at it feel bad). Now lets take the rest of the world who does not care about inclusivity in volleyball and just wants the best performing athletes, who do you think wins at the Olympics? Even if USA is much better at volleyball than the rest of the world, how long do you think it will take for this to change?
The only thing I can say to all of this rhetoric you wrote I hope you have proof to support some of the self observational comments you have listed as to the reasoning why Blacks children/students are not at a higher academic level as other children. I for a fact know that systematic racism and bias plays a hand at the lack of support and resources provided to Black students compared to other races. I know for a fact that there is the lack of support from school administrators and teachers to promote Black student achievement compared to other races. So this so called conversation you wish to have about racism is not as transparent and revealing if you can not understand that it is not just about flash cards and turning off the television. There is a need for students of all races and cultural background to receive a welcome mat upon entry of school instead of seeing schools/teachers/administrations pull up the mat depending on who is attempting to cross the threshold.
Because he’s a racist?
It’s not a coincidence that this topic is bringing the nerdy, maladjusted scientific racism scumbags out of the woodwork. For at least half of the anti-Collins crusaders (including Diane Yap, who surfaced these old tweets in the first place), it was never about a high-minded adherence to the principle of anti-racism, it was about their own gross tribalism and nothing more. Besides that there’s plenty of just overtly racist stuff that Yap and others here have said too, the bad faith is made obvious by the fact that **none of them are willing to engage with the idea that started this whole thing**: that there might be a grain of truth in Collins’s point that anti-black attitudes among some Asian-Americans might be A Thing. They don’t want to have that conversation because lots of the people making the loudest stink about Collins, in fact, harbor those very same attitudes! They are proving Collins’s point about anti-black biases with an absolutely amazing lack of self-awareness.
This is why we can’t have dialog about racial issues. I have a nonwhite wife and kids and have been a minority most of my life, nearly all of my friends are nonwhite, mostly black and Latino. You have no idea who I am, but you are trying to pressure others to obey groupthink by essentially saying, obey me or I’ll call you racist. As America is dedicated to anti-racism, that is a serious threat and lives are ruined over accusations of racism. Ali calls people racist all the time. Destroying Lowell was more damaging to many Asian families than a carjacking. It was a cruel act. Eliminating 8th grade algebra was cruel. It is not racist to state facts. Asian Americans study over twice as much as whites in California and thus earn more money and are more than 3x as likely to make a UC. Black kids study less than whites, on average. It’s not due to food insecurity or racist white people but because studying is less fun than TV, social media, hanging out, video games or other diversions. Obama got elected by saying any man who abandons his kids and doesn’t marry the pregnant mother of his kids and try to be the best dad he can be and help teach his kids is a lowlife, and you can never be so poor you can watch TV with your kids but can’t possibly study. Immigrants from Africa outperform whites because they have an open mind and believe effort pays off. The goal of integration is that poor performing kids with bad attitudes will learn success from high performing, high sacrificing kids of Tiger Parents. I want more black and Latino kids at Lowell. Latino kids went from 7 to 12% over 10 years based on increased study hours. I want more black kids, but they have to choose to sacrifice the same time Asian kids do on flashcards, workbooks, reading, looking up words, trying to correct grammar if they hear friends misconjugate verbs, read all Summer, etc. They have the time and libraries have the material free as do many nonprofits. It’s not racist to note that Asian kids study more. It’s racist not to say that because then test score differences would be genetic. Geoffrey Canada says black kids and parents have to sacrifice as many hours as it takes. San Francisco should pay tutors for every poor kid, 3 hours a week, and make it mandatory for anyone living in public housing in SF. We have 10 people who want to live in housing that would go for 3000 a month on the free market, so we should say, we don’t require money, but you have to be willing to sacrifice, assimilate, attend tutoring and do everything you can to break the cycle of poverty or someone else can live in your highly desirable public housing. We need to focus on habits, not accusing others of racism. Nothing Asians say or do prevents black kids from studying harder. Ideally black kids will sacrifice everything possible timewise to prove they want to learn and are as smart and moral and hardworking as these immigrants. We are to be judged on the content of our character. If you stay married even if not getting along, dedicate yourself to your kids, study 10,000 hours more than average, eat well, avoid drugs, marry before kids, do workbooks and flashcards and long hours of reading and grammar study, the content of your character is good, no matter your race. If you barely study, are rude to teachers, don’t read summers, and spend more time watching TV than reading, the content of your character needs improvement. We should try to get all kids to make the admirable effort Asian kids, on average, do make.
Her first tweets were not ‘totally legit’. It sounded like she is hiding behind her daughter and taking potshots at Asian Americans. If her daughter witnessed a bullying incidence then was it ever reported? Who were the perpetrators? Which teacher did she report it to? She seemed to be soliciting negative stories about Asian Americans in order to push her agenda.
Is it OK if I send out a tweet asking for stories about Black students beating up other students? Of course not. You would and you should see my motives as being totally racist.
Furthermore, Asian Americans studying hard to get ahead, is not ‘White Supremacy’. She is equating academic success with ‘acting white’, which is the most destructive thing a black parent could do. Asian Americans have a long history of schooling and testing that way predates any notion of White Supremacy, or White people as an identity. It is totally ignorant for her to equate academics with ‘White Supremacy’.
Using White Supremacist thinking to assimilate and get ahead? Allison Collins married a wealthy white real estate developer. Who is using White Supremacy to assimilate and get ahead now? She needs to take a good look at the mirror before she calls anyone else a house Ni****.
That’s exactly what the racist Allison Collins did. She took a few incidences and labels and entire race as “that way”. That is not textbook stereotyping racism. The racist views against ALL Asian students, parents, and teachers (yes, she said that), has no role in policy making roles for the SFUSD. She has implemented VERY UNFAIR policies against Asians due to her racism…and turns around and calls racism on others. This is spineless, deceitful, and hurtful to all Asians and anyone with an ounce of ethics in their body. Shame on this racist sham Allison Collins!
It is true that standardized testing in the form of a civil service exam originated in Han China. However, while the school district is 40% Asian American, not all Asian Americans thrive academically. Yes, hard work and admissions into top tier universities can lead to increased earnings, but not every Asian American is thriving. Success depends on many factors, but there is something called the “immigrant paradox” where even low-wage Asian families can thrive through hard work. However, meritocracy in the United States is a myth. Many jobs are obtained through social networking, something non-Hispanic white people of considerable wealth engage in.
The SAT/ACT is being phased out by 1,600 colleges and universities in this country in the meantime during the pandemic. There are more than 5,300 universities and colleges in the United States. The SAT/ACT does not predict college success per se for someone attending the prestigious Berklee College of Music in Boston.
I’m 1/4 Asian American, but I’m Afghan. Afghan Americans in the Bay Area form the largest Diasporic community in the United States. As refugees and displaced persons, we have certainly beat the odds but not everyone prospers. The same is true of other Asian refugee groups that have been resettled in this country compared to those who are voluntary migrants.
When talking about “Asians” in America, Afghans and other South Asians are usually not included in the conversation. People in this country tend to focus on those from East Asia. Afghans are lumped in with “Arab/Muslim Americans,” which is a disservice to the unique needs of my community.
We need to realize that the term “Asian American” includes a diverse group of people, while some of us are thriving in terms of educational obtainment and accumulation of wealth, not all of us are. Many Asians despite pressures to excel in school, still find themselves living on the economic margins in poverty. We also are subjected to covert discrimination, and recent events like 9/11 or the pandemic, remind us that we have to be vigilant.
Thank you Gustavo for your clear thinking and helpful words!
I am joining the conversation many months late, but I want to remind everyone that harm to any one is harm to all.
I must be obtuse, because I do not understand the double standard at play here. If Jenny Lam tweeted about anti-Asian attitudes in the Black community and cited the number of violent attacks against Asian Americans as “evidence” of these attitudes, all hell would break loose. Her career, public or otherwise, would be ruined. There would not be any opportunity for articles like this one analyzing context or motives.
The only explanation that seems to make sense is that we, as Americans, have internalized and normalized anti-Asian racism. We can’t even bring ourselves to call it what it is. Using Asians as a punching bag is accepted, because they are the “perpetual other” a group that does not speak up. I commend Norman Yee for pushing back against that narrative and using his voice for once! Unfortunately, I doubt anyone is really going to take him and his friends seriously.
See this guy doesn’t know the reference.
https://ccnmtl.columbia.edu/projects/mmt/mxp/speeches/mxa29.html
Listen to the whole speech on YouTube if you have half an hour. Amazing stuff.
Don’t even try to justify racist, misdirected hate coming from a school board member. You cannot put an entire group on blast when she cites a few incidences. What then is the difference if I cite crime statistics and call all Blacks felons and drug dealers? I doubt Ms. Collins would take to that lightly, but that’s EXACTLY what she did. She is a disgraceful RACIST, and she needs to go. Like yesterday.
Jim —
As stated explicitly in the story, you’re asking me to put nuance and context into these statements that Collins did not.
Mere use of that phrase is not necessarily a reference of any sort.
If she wanted to walk me through it or walk anyone through it, the chance was there.
JE
Perhaps Ms. Collins was expecting too much of her audience to expect them to be familiar with Black History. Americans are pretty deliberately clueless about Black History especially militant Black leaders like Malcolm X. Her main mistake was in not realizing that her audience was ignorant and racist.
Perhaps it’s too much for Ms. Allison Collins to understand what she did was racist and put down all Asian American students, parents and teachers and unfairly stereotyped them and has made policy decisions against Asian Americans based on her hatred for all Asians. Moving kids around, renaming schools, stripping away academic entry….none of that solves the root cause of the academic failures of certain groups of students…which is family values around academic commitment and achievement, high academic standards, no entitlement mentality as if someone owes you anything, and not looking for entitlement and lowering standards to compete. If she wanted to make progress, she wouldn’t spend all her time on cosmetic BS and put together after school and tutoring support for inner city students, build programs that pair mentors (e.g. high school for elementary school students, college for high school students, etc.), and give students what they REALLY need to excel instead of HANDICAPPING the education system.
Jim, you need to stop. As an Asian-American, I am plenty versed in the concept of house vs. field n*****’s, because unlike your assumptions about people like me, I’ve invested time in learning about Black history. If you still can’t see why her use of that term to disparage an entire race is divisive, reckless and hurtful, especially in a contemporary context, please kindly join Ms. Collins in attending some sensitivity training as you two seem afflicted with the same disease.
As a Latinx parent at Lowell I feel numb and tired. None of the discussions this year actually included community building or work toward solidarity. They felt like theatre and politics. I don’t even think the tweets are the strongest reasons for Collins to leave. She is incapable of building bridges. And, what I can’t dismiss is she is likely a factor in why we are losing our first Black superintendent, as well as our Black vice principal, and our Latinx vice principal. Black and brown people are leaving that were integral parts of our community. I don’t care about nuance or context, we need to heal and trust each other, because without solidarity we are going nowhere.
We have to understand the context…calling someone a house n for doing well in school and getting in to lowell and then to UC and then getting a great job is a gross distortion of what malcolm x was talking about(because he was speaking specifically about blacks)….using the model minority concept and equating it to house n’s makes sense only if you feel all minorities must side with certain political and racial ideologies….her entire folly is to assume that asian people must submit and further woke agendas, and if they dont they are siding with white supremacy….Malcolm spoke in the context of independence not in the forced integration and forced equity that the woke mob intends to impose…the collective freakout the bay had because of trump is not an excuse, forced solidarity is not true solidarity….blaming those that mastered the system as siding with the supposed master, and subsequently complicit in the oppression of others is a truely distorted sense of reality….inequity does not racism make just because your woke guru said so
” Her main mistake was in not realizing that her audience was ignorant and racist.”
Why are you assuming the best with Ms. Collins? Based on her actions—not just with these tweets, but in all the board meetings, in person, and on social media—she’s someone who believes her perspective is the correct one, naysayers be damnned. She has too much pride to admit when she’s wrong—that was evident even before those tweets came to light.
Now, she decided that being self-righteous is more important that trying to reach out to a part of the SF community that is in a lot of pain right now.
Her main mistake is that she can’t get over her own ego.
I wasn’t aware that Malcolm X called out “white liberals,” in today’s parlance, “white allies.” Interesting how debates from 50-60 years ago are very relevant today.
Speaking of Malcolm X.
“The worst enemy that the Negro have is this white man that runs around here drooling at the mouth professing to love Negros and calling himself a liberal, and it is following these white liberals that has perpetuated problems that Negros have. If the Negro wasn’t taken, tricked or deceived by the white liberal, then Negros would get together and solve our own problems. I only cite these things to show you that in America, the history of the white liberal has been nothing but a series of trickery designed to make Negros think that the white liberal was going to solve our problems. Our problems will never be solved by the white man.”
You are the enemy of all. Less obvious of an enemy than Trump, but an enemy nonetheless. Shaming Asian Americans for toiling to get to where we are today. And advocating for policies that belittle the black community under the faulty assumption that they cannot achieve the same results as the rest of us. Can’t you see how this rhetoric diminishes the confidence of those communities, while also stoking envious hatred towards other communities? You live in your generational wealth bubble while putting minorities against each other. You are as much if a white supremacist as Trump’s followers, except they come in wolf’s clothing.
I see this comes from the Alison Collins school of public relations – yell at and insult others who don’t immediately agree with you and ignore their point of view.
“ Her main mistake was in not realizing that her audience was ignorant and racist.”??? Seriously? Calling everyone not with you “racist” lol this proves you are a friend of Collins, that’s what she did exactly in our school board meeting. She called everyone not agreeing with her RACISTS! Do you understand how racist your assumption is? Good luck and good bye.
Perhaps Ms. Collins should ask the Asian American community before she speaks on our behalf. She states the Asian American community don’t need help because she believes we are crazy rich Asians. Ask her to look around before she insults us again. Please, do just that.
“Her main mistake was in not realizing that her audience was ignorant and racist.”
^ a true masterclass in how to win friends and influence people
Jim —
Thanks for your comments. I think we’re good here.
JE
Why don’t you put her tweets in context by referencing the Malcolm X quote she was obviously referring to?
Most readers are too clueless to know where is she coming from.
Let me help you with some context: Asian Americans are the second most likely to vote Democratic after Blacks and overwhelmingly voted for Obama twice ad against Trump twice, so maybe Collins should take her head out of the 1960s and understand this os 2021, and her “House N****r ” idiom is 60 years out of date. And if she can drop the pretension of being an amateur Orientalist long enough actually listen to the Asian community its she thinks she represents, perhaps we can give her a few history lessons.
Oh please, here’s the only context you need to know. Collins put down entire generations of hard working immigrant Asians who came to this country, worked hard, and sacrificed for their children while emphasizing education when they couldn’t even help their children. It’s the foundational values and morals (rather than entitlement, blame, and bringing standards down) instilled in these kids that propel them to 95% graduation rate from SFUSD…not White Supramacy values. What a disgraceful, offensive, and pathetic woman. A racist has no role on making policy decisions where 50% of students are Asian Pacific Islander.
Jim Ausman; Oh, please enlighten us, the clueless readers. #condenscendingtwat
Jim, she was not referencing Malcolm X. She was using the term “House N*****” as a euphemism for “Model Minority”. This is a status bestowed upon Asian-Americans in relation to African-Americans. This word describes the position with which Asian-Americans reside in the American racial hierarchy and the direction where loyalties are placed.
https://youtu.be/PuGkVzeh4zM
Adams ruins everything.
No. It is racism, it is inflammatory, and it is not appropriate for someone responsible for children she is clearly racist towards
It doesn’t matter where she got the quote from, it is outrageous for her to call Asian Americans ‘house ni****s’. This is not ‘What’s up my Ni**as’. This is outright using the word in its original negative, perjorative sense to insult another race. This is as racist as it gets. If she gets away with this then what message are we sending to the school kids? That it is now OK for you to call somebody of a different race a ni***?
Have you read Malcolm X’s speech? He did it and I think that she has a nuanced view of race relations. You want to silence a strong outspoken Black woman because she speaks truth to power.
Your argument is irrelevant mainly. Despite the origin of the term, and how the media and a few individuals want to dub the comparison of Asians to HNs as the racism in her tweets (although her statements seemingly gaslights the implication that we are our people’s stereotype – submissive), the primary outcry is based on the fact that her problem about a school was that there were “TOO MANY ASIANS” in the first place – – I mean, WTH? Too many as opposed to what?! Does she have a place in mind where she would prefer Asians to live and go to school? Are we reverting back to segregation? After all, that’s something Malcolm X wanted – or more so, the complete separation of blacks from whites and basically the rest of Americans. And to add more insult, she then suggests our accomplishments in America are false, that we are still only “the help” because we “use white supremacy” to get ahead, based on her opinion that Asians were too silent for her political liking in 2016. Honestly, those assumptions border on racist views of what Asians are, and she expressed them as a private citizen – What else does she say about Asians when she’s in private citizen mode?
The problem with her Tweets is that we are now in 2021, not 2016. She is no longer a private citizen but a public official. Her comments to me, as someone who is part Asian American (Afghan/South Asian), generalize an entire community. Is there anti-Blackness among non-white Americans in this country? Absolutely! However, then she started stereotyping an entire community as being “less than woke.” She referenced Trump, no political figure in this country can get away with what Trump does. Rather than be apologetic, she became defensive. Apologizing means you acknowledge how your words are perceived as hurtful to others. Empathizing with how others perceive your words.
If she were really sorry she’d reverse making Lowell Lottery, renaming 44 schools and not reopening, and ending honors and 8th grade algebra. She hurt thousands of Asian Families by destroying Lowell, and many girls who study longer hours than boys. She never praised Asians for long study hours and sacrifice. She isn’t sorry. She doesn’t encourage black kids to study long hours. She wants them to hate whites, and Asians, as she hates Asians. She isn’t sorry at all. She’s just sorry she got caught. If she were sorry she’d support KIPP and charters, restore Lowell, and spend some of the salary increase money on tutors for black kids who will encourage them to sacrifice as many hours as the average Asian kid does. It’s antiracism to note if blacks studies as much as even low income Asians, racial inequality would end quickly. The attitude some blacks have holds others down. We should hold up any group who studies hard and get others to be more like them, including Nigerian Americans.
You are trying to suppress the vulnerable Asian American community from speaking out against the racist Collins. Her skin color and gender doesn’t give her the right to discriminate and belittle another race! It’s not okay for a black woman to put others down. Give respect to earn respect!
Hahahaha no.
She wasn’t providing a nuanced perspective on race relations based on Malcolm X’s speech, she was slandering another race.
Saying her approach was too nuanced for people to understand is pathetic…there is no nuance on Twitter, everyone has known that since long before 2016.
Very well said,Bedbug. “Take out of context”, ” nuance”, ” need to read Malcom X”, blah, blah, blah. Collins is not only a racist, but she and her defenders are agressive, condencending racista.
I don’t care how strong a black woman she thinks she is, she has no standing to be calling Asian Americans ‘house ni***s’. No more than I as an Asian American, have the right to call her any type of racial epithet. Do you need to re-take the Diversity and Respect class?
Hey @F*ckingTired – the whole reason Lowell was “elite” was because of the admissions test. It made it hard to get into. So they figured, Asians are overrepresented b/c they do well on the tests.. so the only way to get more blacks in is to eliminate the admissions test. But then that won’t make it elite, and it will no longer be a desirable school. Do you see that? It just became another school taken down by “woke” progressives. The thinking is backasswards.
are y’all dumb…you want to be oppressed so bad….dude this black women is literally telling you that you are over represented in SF schools asshole. Try listening. Jesus; black people are not keeping you down; fuck.
She didn’t call them the n word. Y’all really need to learn nuance.
You’re essentially saying “It’s not racist if it’s the truth!” You sound exactly like the racist white supremacists you’re supposedly against.
No amount of nuance can excuse calling another race “house n*****s”. You can’t hide behind Malcolm, that speech doesn’t lessen what was said by her in any way.
This is just a clueless interpretation of both Malcolm’s quote and the way Collins deployed it.
Nobody is “calling” anyone a n*** in the quote/reference. The entire point of the quote is that the people being referred to will always be considered to be n***s IN THE EYES OF THEIR RACIST OPPRESSORS, no matter how much they mistakenly think that “playing by the master’s rules” will elevate them above that status. The focus of the quote is to emphasize the crucial importance of solidarity in resistance, not to demean its subjects as ACTUALLY n***s.
If Ms. Collins wants to give me a call and walk me through it, she has my number.
I don’t think this detail is going to placate anyone.
JE
No, she shouldn’t have to walk you through anything. YOU are the one that has to start centering black culture and indigenous culture in your work. Why are you leaving it up for this queen to waste her time in explaining shit. Alison Collins read people for filth! This is like when Megan Markle went on Oprah and read the royal people for her own experience and interactions. The only thing is that Alison Collins didn’t have a sympathetic audience or fans, she only had Twitter. This is a sad day in SF, and might just push me out.
I think you are wrong, I think putting what she said in historical reference makes the whole “house n*****” reference make a lot more reasonable. I mean some people are just jumping on the bandwagon but reasonable people will realize she was referencing Malcolm X and have more sympathy for the context. I just listened to his whole speech today for the first time. Masterful.
” I mean some people are just jumping on the bandwagon but reasonable people will realize she was referencing Malcolm X and have more sympathy for the context.”
How convenient, but wait…then Joe Rogan does the same thing…quoting folks using the “n” word, but get’s all but cancelled by the liberal left.
It’s rich that the “progressives” who swept the likes of Abraham Lincoln under the rug as dishonorable racists in the school-renaming fiasco are now calling for forgiveness and “historical context” for a contemporary racist.
Totally and completely agree with Jim Ausman. We are finally in a climate where more of the mainstream is actually (supposedly) listening to Black voices. But when Black voices are too explicit about their experience, we are punishing them?! As a now-elected official, Collins might have benefited by clearly acknowledging that her past tweets have caused pain by generalizing a very diverse community. However, as this article points out, Collins was expressing her experience. And she did not say “all” Asians. She said “many” – and there is a difference. I am a first generation American of South Asian descent by way of my father. My father was not racist against Black Americans. But I would not be offended if Collins’ commentary was directed toward “many” South Asians. Collins is absolutely right about us benefiting from this model minority myth! These are issues that I only fully realized post-George Floyd when the time finally came to examine our role in anti-Blackness. What is happening here is very sad. Collins did not fabricate her experience. Her tweets, in my opinion, are not fighting words toward Asian Americans. They are a call to support one another! They are an emotion-infused plea to step UP. Together. When minority communities don’t support one another, white supremacy THRIVES. This is what Collins is pointing out. That if we do not unite in solidarity (Black, Asian, Hispanic), we all remain n-words. Yes, I know the language is shocking to many. We all need to GROW UP. Because Collins is not wrong!! As Americans, we are so wholly UNAWARE of the true history of this nation and the very purposeful barriers put in place to keep Black Americans down. I received a class A education throughout my life yet I was in the dark on much of it until this past year. The fact is that the success of East and South Asians in this country would not be possible without the blood shed by Black Americans in the civil rights movement. East and South Asians benefited (and continue to benefit) tremendously from their fight – unencumbered by the crippling poverty, the over-policing and the “stigma” of being Black. Black people have been beaten, battered and abused in this country, both literally and figuratively, for centuries—put at great disadvantage through written laws up until the 1970s and through unwritten practice ‘til present day—and when a good portion of their communities don’t thrive, we blame their lack of work ethic! And when members of their communities DO thrive but DARE to point out problems standing in the way of real change, they are maligned and punished. It’s GARBAGE. Should Asian Americans be proud of their communities, their culture, their hard work and their accomplishments in this country? Of course! But Collins is not wrong in saying, Hey don’t ignore our struggle! Don’t ignore how prejudice toward Black people from anyone in the Asian community furthers white supremacy! If you don’t understand her tweets or my comments here, please educate yourselves on the history of systemic racism in America. I don’t say that from a high horse perspective. I say that as a brown girl whose eyes were opened this year, and who now gets it. My wish is for all minority communities to have each other’s back. That is the only way we make real change in the fight against racism and I believe that’s exactly what Collins’ tweets were about. Don’t step on the backs of Black people and look down on us while you’re getting ahead. Give us a hand and let’s rise up together.
What if someone tweeted that insert “Your race” used white supremacy thinking to get ahead? How would you feel? Your long novel or a response showed exactly why you are a Collins’ supporter-you had to turn the whole situation into YOU YOU YOU! Never mind about the subject at hand, you want to take the time to school people on YOUR situation and whatever situation Collins has experienced. The fact of the matter is, is that the tweet was racist. If someone tweeted that and used YOUR race in the tweet, you would understand. If someone says there are too many of YOU somewhere, you would be offended. Lowell is a merit based entrance school-are you saying that kids of all races were not offered the SAME opportunities or are you saying Black and Brown students were purposely excluded?! Asian students come from less fortunate households and immigrant households as well where parents may not speak english. So to the Asians that were able to rise above and make it into a merit based school, Alison Collins does NOT LIKE IT. So let’s just say it’s not race–let’s just say she said there are too many kids that like toasted sandwiches at this school. Never mind that the toasted sandwich loving kids studied and passed exams etc to get into the school-Alison thinks that kids who like pasta should be given a chance to go to this school just because there are too many toasted sandwich liking kids at Lowell. Is that fair?? Pasta loving kids should be let in-not based on merit, but based on the fact that they happen to love pasta? So the toasted sandwich kids who have worked hard, who have their OWN set of obstacles not unlike some of the Pasta loving kids, should be punished because they like toasted sandwiches? Were the pasta kids PREVENTED from taking the opportunities offered to them in school? Were the opportunities ONLY offered to Toasted Sandwich kids? No, there are a large variety of answers. Maybe the elementary and middle schools Pasta kids went to didn’t have as good funding and not as many programs? Maybe there were no role models at home? Maybe no English speaking guardians that could help with reading? Maybe guardians that had to work a lot and couldn’t help with school work or didn’t have the skills to help? Maybe there wasn’t tutoring at school? Maybe no wifi at home? Maybe studying wasn’t certain kids’ priorities or maybe they were not told how important it was to get the grades to get into a merit based high school? I don’t know but I know there are MANY MANY variants. But the fact remains–Collins wants to punish the people who did qualify based on merit. They just happened to be toasted sandwich loving kids. But how ironic it is that she sends her kids to a merit based entrance school. Collins thought she could pull a fast one during the pandemic and pull a fast one in the name of racial and social justice. She is doing a dis-service to those kids. Instead, she should demand that elementary and middle schools across SF be as rigorous and if there is an instance where she can prove that asians are given more opportunities in the elementary and middle school where they were able to get an education good enough to pass entrance exams or used white supremacist thoughts and methods to get ahead, then prove it. Again, I have gone to SFUSD schools growing up in SF, my kids were also enrolled in under-privileged area schools in SF where more than 75% of children are under privileged. There has NEVER EVER been an instance where kids are purposely excluded from any programs or resources at either school.
👏🏾👏🏾👏🏾
I would add to my previous comment… not only benefitting from the model minority myth, but not realizing the way in which it harms us (Asian Americans).
Can you provide more information about what you a referring to?
She attacks Lowell for having the wrong demographics and being merit based, but sends her own daughters to SOTA, which is merit based and has just as disproportional demographics. She plays the race card in every instance possible where there is an angle to play it for political gain or social capital, but she herself is married to a rich white guy. She has her intersectional cake, and she’s eating it too.
The various public board meetings where Allison Colins has continued to single out Asians by citing time, over and over again, that there are too many Asians at Lowell and calling everyone, including Asians, on the meeting who opposed removing merit admissions “racist.” There are a bunch of them so feel free to dig through those meetings here: https://www.sfusd.edu/about-sfusd/board-education/board-education-meetings/2021-board-education-meeting-documents-archive
I also want to add to Tiffany C’s comment that Colins was also unapologetic today as well.
I think Collins is wrong, and unapologetic! Asian Americans are sick and tired of her belittling!!! Her daughter’s prestigious public high school SOTA was never targeted, WHY!?! Her comments in 2016 shows her true self. This hate from her is especially obvious on her attacks on Lowell. We know exactly why Lowell and not SOTA. We heard her over and over again “Too Many Asians”! She said the Asian Americans don’t need help! SOS! Is she Asian? Why she’s speaking on our behalf? We are hurt and in pain, especially seeing her unapologetic face today. Please stop saying we are influenced like we are stupid. We are ourselves and we know exactly what to feel and think when we see a racist. 2021, is the year we speak up. We are fed up with her discrimination! We belonged here! She can go ahead with her threat and try to deport us! Collins must resign!
You know Tiff when whites say and holler that there are too many Asians in the UC university system I don’t hear too many asians opening their mouth the silence is deafening………oops can’t disagree with god