I wish I could say I was shocked by Alison Collins’s recent racist rants. I’m not.
Back in 2016, Ms. Collins called my Chinese-American community “house n*****s. You can use asterisks to your heart’s content, but we all know what she said. She didn’t care. She said it again last week.
The difference is this time she’s a current Commissioner of the San Francisco Board of Education (SFBoE). Her job is to guide the education of 49,000+ impressionable young minds.
Alison Collins got “banned” from Twitter for those comments. To be honest, as a Chinese-American, I wasn’t surprised by her retweet. She told us who she was in 2016.
What surprised me was the silence. Not a single member of the SFBoE has condemned Ms. Collins’s return to Twitter to repeat the very same anti-Asian Tweet that got her banned in the first place.
Here’s a simple question:
When did it become okay to hate Asian-Americans?
In the last two years, the Asian-American community has been harassed and beaten at unprecedented levels. The data don't lie. Yet Ms. Collins feels comfortable using disgusting words about us. Insult to injury, SFBoE President Gabriela López repeated it. And the rest of the SFBoE sat by in silence. No one said a thing.
That’s what complicity looks like. And Ms. Collins calls us “racists.”
Who else is done with this silence?
BOE members should be upstanders!