Imagining Racism

I can't resist reporting on this again. Political correctness in Portland, Oregon has gone absolutely stark raving mad. It seems that the portland school system has decided that Lynch Meadows, Lynch Wood and Lynch View elementary schools will no longer be allowed to have "Lynch" in their names before the upcoming school year in response to  what the school system claims (falsely) is "growing concern about the word's racial connotations". Huh?

The schools, part of the Centennial School District, were named for the Lynch family, which donated land over a century ago to build the first of the schools. That's it! But Centennial Superintendent Paul Coakley says many newer families coming into the district associate the name with  what he bizarrely calls America's violent racial history. Coakley is black and an  advocate of political correctness. The upcoming change is a new step in a movement that, in Oregon, has focused primarily on names "insensitive" to American Indian descendants....err...let me be politically correct here.... descendants of Native Americans.

"There were an increasing amount of questions and some complaints from families of color around the name," Coakley said. But this is news to most people in Portland. No proof was given by Coakley of these many complaints. There is no connection between the Lynch family and the practice associated with the term lynching, he said, but it's still been "a disruption for some students." In case Coakley is not educated as to how the term lynching got it's use as a verb, let me explain. The term "lynch" originated because of the activities of Colonel Charles Lynch, a Revolutionary War colonist in the late 18th century.  Lynch was a Colonel during the Revolutionary War who tried and punished the "Tories" (people who sided with England  in America during the war between American colonists and England) after the was with no legal jurisdiction.  Her sought to have them hanged, thereby coining the verb lynch.



This PC stupidity is out of control. There is nothing wrong with the names of those schools. The name in itself has historical value showing the generosity of a local family, the Lynch family, who obviously valued education by donating the land on which the schools with their name, Lynch, were built. Changing the name is a slap in the Lynch family's face as well as their gift. The school district should not change the name, but rather educate the students and their families (and Coakley) about the history of the name (noun not a verb).

Not all of history is warm and fuzzy. During the time after the Civil War (post 1865) blacks, Hispanics and  poor whites were sometimes "lynched' without a trial in remotes areas not served by police. In the late 19th century American west, lynching were not uncommon for criminals. Most of those lynched were white. In Oregon, between 1882-1067 when lynching happened 21 people were lynched. Of those 20 were white and only one black. Yet, Coakley says blacks in the district are "offended' by the schools name having Lynch (the noun) in it. It's bizarre, but then all PC nonsense is. This is yet another example of a huge the problem with the American education system, in that it is as much focused on bigoted PC social engineering as it is on educating students in reality.

Instead of being PC and changing the name the Portland schools should teach those children historical fact as well as the difference between verbs and nouns. Shame on Portland. When you choose to revise rather than teach the context, and you allow others to continue in their own ignorance, then you fail to be educators. Coakley and his ilk are good examples of such failure. Thank PC Portland for impugning the good name of generous family with your bigoted imagination of racism.