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Renaming Huff Elementary
The purpose of schools is to prepare each generation for their future, and we as an entire nation are witnessing right now a cultural shift to a beautifully more diverse future.
Change, however good, is messy, and in this case, how we view and celebrate our past is complicated and messy.
As a history teacher, I teach my students to explore their own ethical standards, along with trying to understand the contexts that influenced the people of the past, as well as look for the unspoken voices of that past that allow each student to take a personal stake in our American narrative.
As an Asian American and teacher of both history and ethnic studies, I am saddened by the anti-Asian attitudes and policies of the 1800s through the 1940s. In Mountain View, this was seen in the segregation of Chinese to Chinatowns like the one once on Villa Street. Across the West Coast, even in Mountain View, before World War II, this was seen in efforts to exclude Japanese American farmers, later to be packed into trains at the Castro station to be sent to internment camps.
These were the acts of the community, not just one man, nor was Frank L. Huff a leader in making these atrocities happen.
Who was Huff? He was the son of one of Mountain View’s early families. His house is a current landmark on Diericx Drive. He was an early Mountain View educator and philanthropist whom our school is named after.
His recorded personal attitudes sadden me, as do those of his brother: Henry Huff’s 1920 congressional testimony on Japanese farmers being hard-working but a “menace.” I cannot condemn the Huff family for having views that were common in their day.
He was a product of his time, good and bad, reflecting both the pioneering spirit and bigotry of early California. His professional achievements in founding schools in Mountain View were and still are commendable, worthy of timeless community recognition.
Given that many of our schools are named after early residents of the same time period, the likelihood that some of those men held the same views as Huff is high. Should someone be judged differently for having been captured on the internet for expressing the same views as those held by the majority of the state’s voters and its leading political party?
I am not against renaming Huff, for while I do not condemn him, a name of a school is a daily celebration, and the community today gets to decide who they do or don’t celebrate.
I do fear that the renaming makes it seem to our students that this was one bad man. This would be the wrong lesson. I hope Mountain View students will know that most of California sought to keep people like me and many of them out of this state and community. The lesson they need to take away is that Huff was more like all of us than not. What biases from society do we all internalize today, and what active efforts do we take to correct them?
While nothing like the past, Asian students in Mountain View post-COVID-19 report increases in exclusion and ridicule. Huff should be a lesson that we all play a role in supporting and thriving in a more diverse world by recognizing it’s easy to vilify a person of the past, but harder, and more important to look at how we, too, make the
same mistakes in the present.
Christopher Chiang, former Mountain View Whisman School District school board member
Space Park Way
The Voice accepts guest opinions of up to 600 words and letters to the editor of up to 300 words. Send signed op-eds and letters to letters@mv-voice.com by 5 p.m. Monday and noon on Tuesday, respectively.
The Voice accepts guest opinions of up to 600 words and letters to the editor of up to 300 words. Send signed op-eds and letters to letters@mv-voice.com by 5 p.m. Monday and noon on Tuesday, respectively.
The Voice accepts guest opinions of up to 600 words and letters to the editor of up to 300 words. Send signed op-eds and letters to letters@mv-voice.com by 5 p.m. Monday and noon on Tuesday, respectively.
It is good to hear from ‘an affected party’ who has an immigrant family perspective. And Chiang has cred as a secondary school history teacher. The article above is a clear statement and ‘historical approach’ that in some way mirrors the “restorative justice” approach to turning around wayward kids in a school environment. This is An Experienced Educator’s Approach.
Why I support Mr. Chiang for getting another round on the Governing Board of the MVWSD.
History – what is the First Source on this Huff brothers information? As of now, the MVWSD has only offered ‘secondary sources’ (though internet is a great way to get obscure real documents). Would there be a way to ‘cleanse the Huff school name’? Does the family currently support (and publicly broadcast these racist views – assuming it was true of the brothers)? Then – by all means – erase the FAMILY NAME from our communities public school!
But, and I speak to Trustee Wheeler particularly and directly, did the Treman family, over in Palo Alto, deserve to have their, and their father and their grandfather family-name disrespected because their ancient ancestor (great-great-grandfather of the youngest) was a proponent of eugenics? (racism in a pseudo-scienctific package). [Terman MS renamed]. HOW MANY GENERATIONS DOES THE FAMILY HAVE TO “PAY” for THIS? Terry Terman has been a great supporter of local ‘good government’ (with his late wife – decades in the League of Women Voters). I for myself, never heard a specific or unspecific racist theory or utterance from Terry Terman. The great academic honor, of the Terman family at Stanford had to do, for many of us engineers, with the son of ‘the problem’. THAT Professor Fred Terman, the son, was a close engineering mentor of the Hewletts and Packards who went on and charitably supported millions of local folks from all immigrant groups and generations. (HP, Hewlett Foundation, Packard Foundation, Monterey Bay Aquarium etc., etc. etc.)
I am coming late to this op-ed.
This supposed historic take is wildly ahistorical in its argument. The “product of their times” argument has been used to excuse racism and white supremacist violence as if people during that time didn’t know better. As long as there have been racists, there have been anti-racists. That’s why we have Civil Rights Uprisings in response to a rise in racist violence and terror. Because anti-racists have always existed in every era of human history. A quick glance at the Wikipedia entry for anti-racism dispels the myth of “a product of his times.”