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That hasn’t stopped some pundits from declaring that the recall signals the end of all progressive politics, especially in places that had extended school closures. A Republican lawmaker on Fox News declared that the results signaled a coming “red wave” in the midterms. This doesn’t mean that the shuttering of schools had no effect on the vote — I’m quite certain it had a large role — but it doesn’t seem to have been the catalyst. A recall requires people to go out and get signatures, file motions and keep up a lengthy campaign. Do we really believe that San Francisco, of all places, became so radicalized against school closures that they triggered the recall in the early months of 2021?
What’s far more likely — and supported by the voting data — is that the recall was mostly brought about by a coalition of parents who were mad about the changes at Lowell. On Feb. 2, 2021, members of the school board put forth a resolution to end test-based admissions at the school permanently and to use instead the district’s standard lottery system as a way to diversify the mostly white and Asian student body. On Feb. 9 the school board voted 5 to 2 to adopt the resolution. Ten days later, two parents began the campaign to recall the three school board members.
The vote capped a year of organizing by a mostly Asian American bloc of parents and citizens. Investors provided much of the campaign’s funding. The large amount — over $2 million in total — has raised questions about whether the effort was just an attempt by Silicon Valley and Wall Street to beat back equity efforts in public schools.
But this sort of dismissal belies the actual organizing that went into the effort and the work of hundreds of volunteers who collected signatures for the recall election throughout the city. It also ignores relatively high turnout rates in Asian neighborhoods and the overwhelming majority of those residents who voted to recall.
As a resident of the Bay Area, I first came across these activists last year while waiting in line outside H Mart, a Korean grocery chain whose San Francisco location is in the southern part of the city. I go to H Mart quite regularly, and for months, nearly every time I went, I would see the same people — mostly elderly Chinese American men and women — standing out front with their fliers and petitions. Asian Americans who normally might not have been involved in the political process started standing in front of restaurants and on corners to collect signatures. This was true in Asian and even non-Asian neighborhoods throughout the city.
They reminded me of the efforts of Richard Close, who, before his recent death, was the president of the Sherman Oaks Homeowners Association in Los Angeles. I wrote about his grass-roots successes in an earlier edition of the newsletter. He was behind monumental changes to California’s landscape, including Proposition 13, the landmark property tax bill, which may very well be the most consequential law on the state books.
Throughout his career, progressives dismissed Close’s activism and his remarkable organizing skills. Instead, they pointed to the fact that he represented a largely wealthy and white constituency and suggested that he had somehow used his power and influence to get undemocratic results. This may have been true, but he had a talent for collecting converts in grocery store parking lots and strip malls, building voting blocs that showed up to every seemingly unimportant election.