Inside Tabia Lee’s firing as De Anza College’s diversity director

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.

Lee’s ouster quickly became a focus in the nation’s 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 Carlson’s 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 Anza’s 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 district’s 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. 

It’s not clear to what degree De Anza understood, when it hired Lee, that she was part of a community of critics of many of today’s 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 she’s 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.

Announcement

 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 they’re 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 Lee’s rejection of the terms “Latinx” and “Filipinx” to her description of ethnic affinity groups as “tribalism,” which one speaker called “heavy with racist connotations.”

Lee’s positions are “adversarial and hostile towards our district’s and college’s values on anti-racism, social justice and equity,” Erick Aragon, co-chair of the Asian Pacific American group, told the trustees, adding that Lee’s 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 Anza’s new educational master plan, for example, she condemned the plan’s 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 Lee’s telling, a hiring committee warned her that De Anza’s 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 that’s why I was attacked from the beginning. Because I declared myself ‘not woke.’”