Tabia Lee

They’re coming for you next: Tabia Lee, the faculty director for the Office of Equity, Social Justice, and Education [OESE] at De Anza College in California, was denied tenure and fired from her job when she repeatedly demanded historical accuracy and color-blind policies from both her department and the rest of the college.

“Historical accuracy and color-blind policies” from a modern college run by leftists? It is to laugh.

Tabia Lee is a black woman who had been an adjunct professor at De Anza when she got the job to run part of the OESE department.

After years of working as a middle-school teacher and an adjunct professor, and founding a network to help minority teachers attain national board certification, Lee was excited get a tenure-track position at De Anza, where her job includes designing workshops to promote inclusion. “I researched them, and I thought we had similar values around diversity, equity and anti-racism,” she said. “I was selected, and I was like, wow, this is a dream come true.”

Instead, Lee found herself constantly harassed and slandered because she tried to bring to her work an even-handed philosophy that attempted to deal with the problems of racial conflict fairly. For example, when Jewish students and faculty members told her they had experienced anti-Semitism on campus, Lee tried to organize a campus event to discuss the problem.

Instead, she said, coworkers told her the event wasn’t important and that Jewish people are white oppressors.

The article at the link describes many more examples of the hatred Lee experienced at this supposed institution of “higher learning.” The most absurd example was when she, a black woman, was accused of being a white supremacist because she, citing the recommendation of the National Association of Black Journalists, recommended that the college in its communications capitalize the names of all racial groups (“White”, “Black,” etc) instead of just those of so-called oppressed peoples.

Another time she was slandered when she refused to join an on-campus socialist network.

“I do not identify as a liberal or a conservative or a Republican or a Democrat or a libertarian or socialist or a communist or a feminist,” she told The Post. “I don’t identify with any of those labels, so I just had no interest in being a part of that.

Then, when Lee tried to streamline her staff’s communications by using GoogleDocs, she was accused by a co-worker of “white-splaining”.

“I’m a black woman, and [they’re] telling me that I’m white-splaining,” Lee recalled. “[Everyone] acted like I had injured [my colleague] instead of it being the other way around, because I didn’t confess to my white supremacy or whatever.”

Her career at De Anza College ended when her tenure was denied because the college claimed she had an “inability to demonstrate cooperation in working with colleagues and staff” and an “unwillingness to accept constructive criticism.” This was followed by a vote by the college administration to dismiss her the end of this academic year.

Lee calls these accusations “bald-faced lies”, and is now considering legal action.

De Anza College, where race and gender rules all

The website for De Anza’s Equity and Engagement Division is very carefully written to avoid any accusations that it plays racial favorites. Yet you would have to be blind to believe it doesn’t do so. For example, the college has a program called “Men of Color”, providing counselors for students. The program’s title and website language, while never mentioning race, is clearly designed with race in mind. There is also a number other similar race-based programs, including a “Black Student Union” and a “Black Faculty, Staff and Administrators Network,” the latter of which is “a network of faculty, staff and administrators who identify as Black, African-American, African, Afro-American or of African ancestry or descent, and those colleagues who support our causes and initiatives.” And of course, like every modern university, De Anza would be incomplete without its very own “Pride Center” for advocating the queer agenda.

In other words, to this college race and gender is everything. Every student and teacher is defined by their race or gender, and the goal must be to promote the oppressed minorities to the detriment of everyone else.

Lee might have imagined her job was to promote good will and fair treatment for all races, but she was naive in the utmost. Her very job’s goal, as written by her, was to make race and gender the primary defining aspect of every human being, not their own personal individuality, and thus she was doomed to failure. When group identity becomes the be-all and end-all, individuality dies, and instead the fight centers on which group will get the most favored treatment while oppressing its rivals. By denying this reality, Lee stood no chance of surviving at her job or at De Anza.

I hope she sues, but to win she is going to have to take a hard honest look at her own priorities. As long as she herself puts race first, her case will always be crippled.