Teaching city children to be snowflakes

Letter to the editor in the NY Times (Why a San Francisco Mural Must Come Down):

Re “San Francisco Spends $600,000 to Erase History,” by Bari Weiss (Sunday Review, June 30):

The San Francisco Board of Education is charged with ensuring the well-being of all our students, academically, socially and emotionally, particularly those who have been historically marginalized. 

When one ignores the heart of the issue that has driven a decades-long battle to repair harm, as Ms. Weiss does, it becomes easy to trot out the tired trope of a feckless bureaucratic board reflexively spending a lot of money to censor an artist who, as it turns out, becomes the real victim in Ms. Weiss’s view.

She dismisses the board’s decision, saying members (who, save one, are all people of color) feared losing reputation and being equated to white supremacists if they didn’t vote to remove the mural, which depicts a dead Native American.

Given that upside-down logic, it’s no wonder that the focus of Ms. Weiss’s commentary is censorship, leaving little space for what the board was actually grappling with: Should an immovable, public-school-located piece of art that for 80 years has traumatized students be allowed to remain?

Ms. Weiss says yes. At the end of her essay she asks, “What happens when a student suggests that looking at photographs of the My Lai massacre in history class is too traumatic?” Her false-equivalency argument is malarkey.

Stevon Cook 

Mark Sanchez 

San Francisco

The writers are president and vice president, respectively, of the San Francisco Board of Education.

Rob's comment:
Remember the names of these misguided people to vote against if/when they appear again on the city's ballot.

Not providing high school students with a realistic account of American history does them a great disservice. The notion that this work of art has actually traumatized students is not credible. 

Those students are the real "victims" of this stupidity, not the artist who is beyond caring. 

Will future students be taught about President Trump's racism or will they be protected from that information lest they be "traumatized" by pictures of children in cages on our border? 

I was shocked and angry when I only began to learn about our country's appalling racial history after graduating from high school in 1960. My classmates and I were on our own to educate ourselves about the real history of our country---that is, if we cared enough to do it.

The notion that we would have been traumatized by that information is fatuous. 

Learning about the My Lai massacre is not false equivalence. It's exactly the sort of thing that every generation must learn about and struggle to prevent.