The San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD) has banned the word “chief” from job titles because of its connotations with Native American leadership and a fear of offending indigenous people.
The San Francisco Chronicle reported Wednesday:
The word “chief” will no longer be used in reference to job titles in the San Francisco Unified School District in an effort, school officials said, to avoid the word’s connotation with Native Americans.
In an administrative decision released on Wednesday, the school district decided to retire the term among its 10,000 employees, said spokesperson Gentle Blythe.
“While there are many opinions on the matter, our leadership team agreed that, given that Native American members of our community have expressed concerns over the use of the title, we are no longer going to use it,” Blythe said in an email.
The origin of the word “chief” is actually French, not Native American, and entered English in the Middle Ages.
The SFUSD has a recent history of renaming things for reasons of left-wing ideology and political correctness. Last year, the board removed the names of the country’s founders from 44 schools, casting George Washington and Abraham Lincoln as racist villains.
Despite a public backlash that resulted in three SFUSD board members being recalled by voters earlier this year, the district has evidently retained its zeal for renaming innocuous things, at the risk of ignoring educational quality.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. His recent book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.