San Francisco school board's latest crisis: Racist tweets

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — The vice president of San Francisco’s school board is under fire for tweets she wrote in 2016 that said Asian Americans use “white supremacist” thinking to get ahead and were racist toward Black students.

The tweets are at the center of a new crisis facing the scandal-plagued Board of Education, which has been sued, criticized and mocked over the past few months.

Board member Alison Collins was the focus of a heated public meeting Tuesday evening attended online by more than 1,000 people, the San Francisco Chronicle reported. Many callers demanded Collins step down, echoing calls by two board members and dozens of officials who have denounced the tweets as racist and anti-Asian. Mayor London Breed also joined the chorus, saying “our students and our API community deserve better."

Collins told the meeting she wanted to again express her “sincere and heartfelt apologies.” In an earlier statement, she apologized for the hurt caused by the tweets, which critics have called a non-apology.

The posts resurfaced last week amid a surge of violence and harassment against Asian Americans in the San Francisco Bay Area and around the country. They are the latest embarrassment for San Francisco’s school board, which has prided itself on putting racial equity at the top of its agenda.

In the midst of the pandemic, the school board faced national criticism for a plan to rename 44 of its schools — including one named for Abraham Lincoln and another for Sen. Dianne Feinstein — that it said honored people with discriminatory legacies. The plan was subsequently put on hold after an avalanche of criticism saying the board should focus on reopening schools, which are still closed despite the city's low transmission rates, rather than renaming them. The board also bowed to complaints that its...