A woke college in California won’t renew its DEI director’s contract because she did her job too well.
That’s the toned-down, super short version of an ongoing legal stoush between De Anza community college, and its former head of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI), Tabia Lee.
Lee alleges her tenure with the college wasn’t being renewed because she openly challenged the college’s [wobbly] Woke policy pushers.
In a 53-page lawsuit filed on July 10, Lee claims to have encountered a hostile department “illegally targeting White people on the basis of race,” explained Newsweek.
The lawsuit recounts how Lee’s determination to put merit before melanin, was deemed incompatible with De Anza’s far-left militantism – “excessive Wokeness.”
Insider Higher Ed, reporting in March, said the DEI chief was unlikely to see out another year with the public tertiary platform.
This is because she:
- questioned antiracist “orthodoxy.”
- declared she was no longer participating in gender pronouns, ‘because the obsession was doing more harm than good.’
- objected to the college’s land acknowledgments for an Indigenous tribe.
- tried to bring a “Jewish inclusion” event to campus.
- declined to join a “socialist network,” refused to use the gender-neutral terms “Latinx” and “Filipinx.”
- inquired why the word “Black” was capitalized but not “white.”
- allegedly disrespected, Alicia Garza, one of the founders of Black Lives Matter Inc.
Lee, refusing to spread the Woke Mind Virus, earned her the dunce’s cap, with colleagues accusing her of “supporting white supremacy,” “white speaking,” and “whitesplaining.”
For her indiscretion, she described being met with “ugly opposition from third-wave antiracist woke activists, who didn’t care too much for her, because she chose to not follow along, and give blind to support their narratives or ways of knowing/working without question.”
Lee further told IHED, “I don’t have ideological or viewpoint fidelity to anyone. I’m looking for what’s going to help people and what will help our students and how we can be better teachers and our best teaching selves.”
Speaking with Newsweek, she asserted, “These are people who should definitely know better.
“The way that they behaved was what they claim other people do to marginalized people.
“They literally marginalized me as an individual, and they shunned me. They worked really hard to push me out.”
Adding support to the de-cancellation of the DEI director, Cato Institute said, “Lee was being punished for being ‘the wrong kind of black person’: one dedicated to classical liberal understandings of equality, individualism, reason, and free speech.”
A founding member of Free Black Thought, Lee is also a veteran educator, who describes herself as a humanist.
On a GoFundMe page created in May to ‘defend academic freedom’ and freedom of speech, Lee wrote, “I’m not a liberal or conservative; I’m not a Republican, Democrat, Socialist, Libertarian, or Communist; I am not left or right wing. I am just a devoted teacher that was unjustly treated.
“It’s important to me to emphasize [to students] not what to think, but how to think critically” about DEI issues – this includes “viewpoint diversity.”
