Leroy N. Soetoro
2023-05-16 18:35:39 UTC
<https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/tabia-lee-de-anza-dei-
17870145.php>
The firing and pending departure of a Black woman as director of
diversity, equity and inclusion at De Anza College in Cupertino after less
than two years in the job has become the latest clash over the
implementation of anti-racism policies on U.S. campuses.
Tabia Lee received a letter in March saying her contract would not be
renewed in June because she was uncooperative with colleagues, unwilling
to accept constructive criticism and unlikely to change. Lee is a vocal
critic of many of todays diversity and inclusion practices, and many
colleagues at the school said she belittled their racial justice
initiatives.
Lee said she fell victim to woke excesses in the campus anti-racism
drive that she could have corrected. Her detractors said she undermined,
rather than uplifted, diversity efforts.
Lees ouster quickly became a focus in the nations culture wars, and Lee
accepted her role with relish. She wrote an essay called A Black DEI
director canceled by DEI for Compact, a new magazine that opposes the
ideology of liberalism, and made her case on Tucker Carlsons Fox News
show before Carlson, who has mocked campus diversity initiatives, was
fired.
I am willing to speak to anyone that is willing to speak to me, Lee
said, noting that Carlson was the first to invite her on the air. She said
she is neither a liberal nor a conservative, but a scholar, a teacher, a
humanist and learner.
Lee said she will fight to keep her job as faculty director of De Anzas
Office of Equity, Social Justice and Multicultural Education, which she
has carried out remotely since the fall of 2021. Her job description at
the public community college of 16,000 students is to promote a
commitment to equity, social justice and multicultural education and
create an inclusive campus environment within an institution-wide
transformation.
Critics said Lee sought to transform the college in the wrong direction.
Groups representing Latino and Asian Pacific American employees urged the
districts Board of Trustees to remove her, contending that she subverted
anti-racism initiatives by opposing everything from their efforts to gain
more say in campus governance to their use of the gender-neutral term
Latinx. In a letter to the college, Lee cited research suggesting the
word has little support among Latinos themselves.
Its not clear to what degree De Anza understood, when it hired Lee, that
she was part of a community of critics of many of todays diversity and
inclusion efforts, who often argue that focusing heavily on racism while
trying to undo it can worsen the problem. Neither a college spokesperson
nor a representative from the Foothill-De Anza College District, which
oversees the school, responded to requests for comment or to specific
questions.
Having a DEI employee take the positions shes taking is very unusual,
Jennifer Hochschild, a professor of African and African American Studies
at Harvard University and an expert on race and politics, said of Lee in
an interview.
Lee is a founding member of an organization called Free Black Thought,
which seeks to amplify vital black voices that are rarely heard on
mainstream platforms, according to its website. In her Compact essay, she
wrote: My crime at De Anza was running afoul of the tenets of critical
social justice, in which campus employees see the world in terms of
unequal identity-based power dynamics that must be exposed and
dismantled.
One of the ways Lee ran into trouble at De Anza, she said, was to resist
stating her preferred pronouns, an increasingly common practice in schools
and businesses to show solidarity with transgender and non-binary people.
I was one of the early proponents of gender pronouns, she told The
Chronicle. But staff began to talk about starting every meeting by saying
your pronouns. Every class. I said that sounded like compelled speech, and
I have a problem with that. She said the practice made some of her non-
binary and gender-fluid friends uncomfortable.
Yet the defining moment of her tenure, Lee said, occurred during a staff
meeting weeks after she arrived. She said she was explaining how the group
could use Google Docs to collaborate and share agendas when a staff member
told her to stop what she was doing.
I was told, What you are doing right now is you are whitespeaking and
whitesplaining, Lee said. She said she felt jarred not only because she
is Black, but because her accuser told her she was being transactional
and therefore supporting white supremacy. (The person who Lee said made
the accusation did not respond to an interview request.)
The incident seemed consistent with what she saw later at two professional
development events on campus, Lee said. She shared screenshots of posters
equating white supremacy culture with several actions and
characteristics, including power hoarding, worship of the written word
and sense of urgency, and said these were presented during the
trainings.
<Loading Image...
>
Lee said she believes she is being fired because she rejects an
ideological approach to diversity that is so narrow it excludes some
groups such as Jewish students who feel marginalized because theyre
white. There is an effort on campus to de-center whiteness, which
generally means avoiding portraying white people as predominant or
superior. But it goes too far at De Anza, she said: People are put into
racialized categories. Everyone is either a victim or an oppressor.
Criticism of Lee at De Anza heightened last June, when six members of the
De Anza Latinx Association and the Asian Pacific American Staff
Association urged the Board of Trustees to remove her. The employees
offered criticisms ranging from Lees rejection of the terms Latinx and
Filipinx to her description of ethnic affinity groups as tribalism,
which one speaker called heavy with racist connotations.
Lees positions are adversarial and hostile towards our districts and
colleges values on anti-racism, social justice and equity, Erick Aragon,
co-chair of the Asian Pacific American group, told the trustees, adding
that Lees views create a hostile work environment.
Maristella Tapia, a sociology instructor and member of the De Anza Latinx
Association, said Lee had repeatedly advocated to remove the language of
anti-racism from institutional documents, arguing that anti-racism is
harmful and divisive ideology.
To add insult to injury, counselor Noemi Teppang of the Asian Pacific
American Staff Association told the trustees, Lee dismissed certain
employees as woke do-gooders.
None of the speakers responded to interview requests.
Lee has indeed referred to colleagues as woke, a term that has emerged
as one of the most polarizing in modern political vernacular. In a 13-page
critique of De Anzas new educational master plan, for example, she
condemned the plans use of the invented Woke racialized term Filipinx
because it was being applied to a group of people by Woke do-gooders on
their behalf. Lee used woke as a negative adjective 13 times.
Although woke was born in the Black community to describe an awareness
that racism continues to drive injustice, it has been co-opted by the
right to condemn a range of causes, including trangender rights, and to
criticize the left as self-righteous.
In Lees telling, a hiring committee warned her that De Anzas equity
office was a little too woke before she got the job. I assured them
that I was not, Lee said she told the committee. I think thats why I
was attacked from the beginning. Because I declared myself not woke.
Asked what the word meant to her, Lee avoided expressing an opinion and
said it had different meanings in different contexts. She pointed to a
survey she conducted to learn the needs on campus, which asked people to
define woke. The range of answers, she said, included being proud of
who I am to fight against the racism and patriarchy that made this
country and a ridiculous focusing on constantly seeing racism and
oppression everywhere.
Lee had a doctorate in education and years of experience when she arrived
at De Anza in 2021. Born in the Central Valley, she spent a decade
teaching in Los Angeles public schools before becoming an education
consultant, according to her resume. She designed curriculum for a few
years at Notre Dame de Namur in Belmont but left in 2020 when the private
college shut down its undergraduate program. She went on to develop
courses and faculty training programs at the College of San Mateo before
landing at De Anza.
At De Anza, Lee said, she got pushback for what she described as her
effort to treat all groups equally. For example, she urged the college to
uppercase white as it does Black when referring to race, pointing to a
recommendation by the National Association of Black Journalists.
Some of the strongest opposition came when she argued against giving a
vote in the Academic Senate to formal affinity groups including her own
Black Faculty, Staff, and Administrators Network on grounds that
unrepresented racialized groups, as she put it, dont get that vote. She
lost both arguments.
An ally, computer science instructor Ron Kleinman, said, Lees story is
that shes a very independent person who really believes in equity but
she doesnt agree with the groups shes supposed to be fighting for. Shes
more inclusive.
One disagreement about Lee touched on a broader national debate over the
role of antisemitism in anti-racism initiatives, and whether American
Jews belong under the umbrella of diversity, equity and inclusion
programs, or whether they dont by virtue of the fact that most are white
and more economically secure, in the words of the Jewish News of Northern
California.
After Jewish students complained about feeling unwelcome on campus, Lee
invited Sarita Bronstein, executive director of Hillel of Silicon Valley,
a chapter of the global nonprofit that supports Jewish students, to share
recommendations with the schools Equity Action Council, which supports
multicultural education.
During Bronsteins remarks, Lee said, an Equity Action member dropped
names of pro-Palestinian groups into the Zoom chat, while another, a
professor, made distracting comments about a chef who had worked for the
Nazis, and about the practice of pardoning turkeys at Thanksgiving,
according to a screenshot Lee shared with The Chronicle.
Bronstein said her recommendations including condemning antisemitism on
De Anzas anti-racism page and considering Jewish holidays in planning the
academic calendar went nowhere. Fall classes are scheduled to begin on
Sept. 25, which is Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish calendar.
Lee went on to organize a Jewish Inclusion & Anti-Semitism Community
Education Summit on campus. When Lees critics asked the trustees to oust
her, Jorge Morales, a counselor from the Latinx Association, referenced
her support for Jewish students. He said she was placing individuals with
institutional and structural privilege and power on the same footing as
marginalized groups. Morales did not respond to an interview request.
As Lee encountered opposition on campus, she found support from outside
critics of modern anti-racism initiatives, including the Foundation
Against Intolerance and Racism, or FAIR. Its advisers include former Fox
News host Megyn Kelly; journalist Bari Weiss, who often critiques what she
calls the strident left; linguist John McWhorter, a self-described
cranky liberal Democrat; and Abigail Shrier, a writer known nationally
for asserting that transgender adolescents are part of a dangerous
craze.
This month, Lee appeared on a webinar hosted by FAIR, whose founder, Bion
Bartning, has said, I dont think its the schools place to teach our
children to be race-conscious.
The idea that someone Black in a diversity position would align with
FAIR and its race-neutral approach is unusual, said Hochschild, the
Harvard professor.Being color-blind is a big red flag. It says, Dont
think about race, just like whites dont think about whiteness.
Reach Nanette Asimov: ***@sfchronicle.com; Twitter: @NanetteAsimov
--
"LOCKDOWN", left-wing COVID fearmongering. 95% of COVID infections
recover with no after effects.
No collusion - Special Counsel Robert Swan Mueller III, March 2019.
Officially made Nancy Pelosi a two-time impeachment loser.
Donald J. Trump, cheated out of a second term by fraudulent "mail-in"
ballots. Report voter fraud: ***@mail.house.gov
Thank you for cleaning up the disaster of the 2008-2017 Obama / Biden
fiasco, President Trump.
Under Barack Obama's leadership, the United States of America became the
The World According To Garp. Obama sold out heterosexuals for Hollywood
queer liberal democrat donors.
President Trump boosted the economy, reduced illegal invasions, appointed
dozens of judges and three SCOTUS justices.
17870145.php>
The firing and pending departure of a Black woman as director of
diversity, equity and inclusion at De Anza College in Cupertino after less
than two years in the job has become the latest clash over the
implementation of anti-racism policies on U.S. campuses.
Tabia Lee received a letter in March saying her contract would not be
renewed in June because she was uncooperative with colleagues, unwilling
to accept constructive criticism and unlikely to change. Lee is a vocal
critic of many of todays diversity and inclusion practices, and many
colleagues at the school said she belittled their racial justice
initiatives.
Lee said she fell victim to woke excesses in the campus anti-racism
drive that she could have corrected. Her detractors said she undermined,
rather than uplifted, diversity efforts.
Lees ouster quickly became a focus in the nations culture wars, and Lee
accepted her role with relish. She wrote an essay called A Black DEI
director canceled by DEI for Compact, a new magazine that opposes the
ideology of liberalism, and made her case on Tucker Carlsons Fox News
show before Carlson, who has mocked campus diversity initiatives, was
fired.
I am willing to speak to anyone that is willing to speak to me, Lee
said, noting that Carlson was the first to invite her on the air. She said
she is neither a liberal nor a conservative, but a scholar, a teacher, a
humanist and learner.
Lee said she will fight to keep her job as faculty director of De Anzas
Office of Equity, Social Justice and Multicultural Education, which she
has carried out remotely since the fall of 2021. Her job description at
the public community college of 16,000 students is to promote a
commitment to equity, social justice and multicultural education and
create an inclusive campus environment within an institution-wide
transformation.
Critics said Lee sought to transform the college in the wrong direction.
Groups representing Latino and Asian Pacific American employees urged the
districts Board of Trustees to remove her, contending that she subverted
anti-racism initiatives by opposing everything from their efforts to gain
more say in campus governance to their use of the gender-neutral term
Latinx. In a letter to the college, Lee cited research suggesting the
word has little support among Latinos themselves.
Its not clear to what degree De Anza understood, when it hired Lee, that
she was part of a community of critics of many of todays diversity and
inclusion efforts, who often argue that focusing heavily on racism while
trying to undo it can worsen the problem. Neither a college spokesperson
nor a representative from the Foothill-De Anza College District, which
oversees the school, responded to requests for comment or to specific
questions.
Having a DEI employee take the positions shes taking is very unusual,
Jennifer Hochschild, a professor of African and African American Studies
at Harvard University and an expert on race and politics, said of Lee in
an interview.
Lee is a founding member of an organization called Free Black Thought,
which seeks to amplify vital black voices that are rarely heard on
mainstream platforms, according to its website. In her Compact essay, she
wrote: My crime at De Anza was running afoul of the tenets of critical
social justice, in which campus employees see the world in terms of
unequal identity-based power dynamics that must be exposed and
dismantled.
One of the ways Lee ran into trouble at De Anza, she said, was to resist
stating her preferred pronouns, an increasingly common practice in schools
and businesses to show solidarity with transgender and non-binary people.
I was one of the early proponents of gender pronouns, she told The
Chronicle. But staff began to talk about starting every meeting by saying
your pronouns. Every class. I said that sounded like compelled speech, and
I have a problem with that. She said the practice made some of her non-
binary and gender-fluid friends uncomfortable.
Yet the defining moment of her tenure, Lee said, occurred during a staff
meeting weeks after she arrived. She said she was explaining how the group
could use Google Docs to collaborate and share agendas when a staff member
told her to stop what she was doing.
I was told, What you are doing right now is you are whitespeaking and
whitesplaining, Lee said. She said she felt jarred not only because she
is Black, but because her accuser told her she was being transactional
and therefore supporting white supremacy. (The person who Lee said made
the accusation did not respond to an interview request.)
The incident seemed consistent with what she saw later at two professional
development events on campus, Lee said. She shared screenshots of posters
equating white supremacy culture with several actions and
characteristics, including power hoarding, worship of the written word
and sense of urgency, and said these were presented during the
trainings.
<Loading Image...
>Lee said she believes she is being fired because she rejects an
ideological approach to diversity that is so narrow it excludes some
groups such as Jewish students who feel marginalized because theyre
white. There is an effort on campus to de-center whiteness, which
generally means avoiding portraying white people as predominant or
superior. But it goes too far at De Anza, she said: People are put into
racialized categories. Everyone is either a victim or an oppressor.
Criticism of Lee at De Anza heightened last June, when six members of the
De Anza Latinx Association and the Asian Pacific American Staff
Association urged the Board of Trustees to remove her. The employees
offered criticisms ranging from Lees rejection of the terms Latinx and
Filipinx to her description of ethnic affinity groups as tribalism,
which one speaker called heavy with racist connotations.
Lees positions are adversarial and hostile towards our districts and
colleges values on anti-racism, social justice and equity, Erick Aragon,
co-chair of the Asian Pacific American group, told the trustees, adding
that Lees views create a hostile work environment.
Maristella Tapia, a sociology instructor and member of the De Anza Latinx
Association, said Lee had repeatedly advocated to remove the language of
anti-racism from institutional documents, arguing that anti-racism is
harmful and divisive ideology.
To add insult to injury, counselor Noemi Teppang of the Asian Pacific
American Staff Association told the trustees, Lee dismissed certain
employees as woke do-gooders.
None of the speakers responded to interview requests.
Lee has indeed referred to colleagues as woke, a term that has emerged
as one of the most polarizing in modern political vernacular. In a 13-page
critique of De Anzas new educational master plan, for example, she
condemned the plans use of the invented Woke racialized term Filipinx
because it was being applied to a group of people by Woke do-gooders on
their behalf. Lee used woke as a negative adjective 13 times.
Although woke was born in the Black community to describe an awareness
that racism continues to drive injustice, it has been co-opted by the
right to condemn a range of causes, including trangender rights, and to
criticize the left as self-righteous.
In Lees telling, a hiring committee warned her that De Anzas equity
office was a little too woke before she got the job. I assured them
that I was not, Lee said she told the committee. I think thats why I
was attacked from the beginning. Because I declared myself not woke.
Asked what the word meant to her, Lee avoided expressing an opinion and
said it had different meanings in different contexts. She pointed to a
survey she conducted to learn the needs on campus, which asked people to
define woke. The range of answers, she said, included being proud of
who I am to fight against the racism and patriarchy that made this
country and a ridiculous focusing on constantly seeing racism and
oppression everywhere.
Lee had a doctorate in education and years of experience when she arrived
at De Anza in 2021. Born in the Central Valley, she spent a decade
teaching in Los Angeles public schools before becoming an education
consultant, according to her resume. She designed curriculum for a few
years at Notre Dame de Namur in Belmont but left in 2020 when the private
college shut down its undergraduate program. She went on to develop
courses and faculty training programs at the College of San Mateo before
landing at De Anza.
At De Anza, Lee said, she got pushback for what she described as her
effort to treat all groups equally. For example, she urged the college to
uppercase white as it does Black when referring to race, pointing to a
recommendation by the National Association of Black Journalists.
Some of the strongest opposition came when she argued against giving a
vote in the Academic Senate to formal affinity groups including her own
Black Faculty, Staff, and Administrators Network on grounds that
unrepresented racialized groups, as she put it, dont get that vote. She
lost both arguments.
An ally, computer science instructor Ron Kleinman, said, Lees story is
that shes a very independent person who really believes in equity but
she doesnt agree with the groups shes supposed to be fighting for. Shes
more inclusive.
One disagreement about Lee touched on a broader national debate over the
role of antisemitism in anti-racism initiatives, and whether American
Jews belong under the umbrella of diversity, equity and inclusion
programs, or whether they dont by virtue of the fact that most are white
and more economically secure, in the words of the Jewish News of Northern
California.
After Jewish students complained about feeling unwelcome on campus, Lee
invited Sarita Bronstein, executive director of Hillel of Silicon Valley,
a chapter of the global nonprofit that supports Jewish students, to share
recommendations with the schools Equity Action Council, which supports
multicultural education.
During Bronsteins remarks, Lee said, an Equity Action member dropped
names of pro-Palestinian groups into the Zoom chat, while another, a
professor, made distracting comments about a chef who had worked for the
Nazis, and about the practice of pardoning turkeys at Thanksgiving,
according to a screenshot Lee shared with The Chronicle.
Bronstein said her recommendations including condemning antisemitism on
De Anzas anti-racism page and considering Jewish holidays in planning the
academic calendar went nowhere. Fall classes are scheduled to begin on
Sept. 25, which is Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish calendar.
Lee went on to organize a Jewish Inclusion & Anti-Semitism Community
Education Summit on campus. When Lees critics asked the trustees to oust
her, Jorge Morales, a counselor from the Latinx Association, referenced
her support for Jewish students. He said she was placing individuals with
institutional and structural privilege and power on the same footing as
marginalized groups. Morales did not respond to an interview request.
As Lee encountered opposition on campus, she found support from outside
critics of modern anti-racism initiatives, including the Foundation
Against Intolerance and Racism, or FAIR. Its advisers include former Fox
News host Megyn Kelly; journalist Bari Weiss, who often critiques what she
calls the strident left; linguist John McWhorter, a self-described
cranky liberal Democrat; and Abigail Shrier, a writer known nationally
for asserting that transgender adolescents are part of a dangerous
craze.
This month, Lee appeared on a webinar hosted by FAIR, whose founder, Bion
Bartning, has said, I dont think its the schools place to teach our
children to be race-conscious.
The idea that someone Black in a diversity position would align with
FAIR and its race-neutral approach is unusual, said Hochschild, the
Harvard professor.Being color-blind is a big red flag. It says, Dont
think about race, just like whites dont think about whiteness.
Reach Nanette Asimov: ***@sfchronicle.com; Twitter: @NanetteAsimov
--
"LOCKDOWN", left-wing COVID fearmongering. 95% of COVID infections
recover with no after effects.
No collusion - Special Counsel Robert Swan Mueller III, March 2019.
Officially made Nancy Pelosi a two-time impeachment loser.
Donald J. Trump, cheated out of a second term by fraudulent "mail-in"
ballots. Report voter fraud: ***@mail.house.gov
Thank you for cleaning up the disaster of the 2008-2017 Obama / Biden
fiasco, President Trump.
Under Barack Obama's leadership, the United States of America became the
The World According To Garp. Obama sold out heterosexuals for Hollywood
queer liberal democrat donors.
President Trump boosted the economy, reduced illegal invasions, appointed
dozens of judges and three SCOTUS justices.