Anti-‘Woke’ DEI Director Tabia Lee Sues California College over Firing

Dr. Tabia Lee formerly of De Anza College
FAIR/YouTube

Dr. Tabia Lee, the former director of the Office of Equity, Social Justice and Multicultural Education at De Anza College in Cupertino, California, is suing the school for firing her after she opposed its “woke” left-wing policies.

As Breitbart News reported earlier this year, De Anza chose not to renew Lee’s contract after she questioned its “anti-racism” policies, which had the effect of stifling speech and even promoting bigotry, such as antisemitism.

Breitbart News noted:

Dr. Tabia Lee told Inside Higher Ed that her contract is being terminated after she questioned antiracist “orthodoxy,” objected to the college’s land acknowledgments for an Indigenous tribe, and tried to bring a “Jewish inclusion” event to campus.

Lee added that additional reasons for her contract not being renewed by the college included her declining to join a “socialist network,” refusing to use the terms “Latinx” and “Filipinx,” and inquiring why the word “black” was capitalized but not “white.”

 

The former diversity director, who is black, added that an employee in her diversity office accused her of “white speaking,” “whitesplaining,” and supporting white supremacy.

Lee also granted an interview to Breitbart News Sunday, where she recounted her fight for diversity, but against “woke” ideology.

The San Francisco Chronicle reported Thursday:

Lee, who has a doctorate in education, taught middle school in Los Angeles for a decade, then developed courses at Notre Dame de Namur University in Belmont and the College of San Mateo before being hired in the summer of 2021 as director of the Office of Equity, Social Justice and Multicultural Education at De Anza. She is also a cofounder of Free Black Thought, an organization of scholars, parents and others who oppose many of the views of mainstream civil rights organizations.

Early in her tenure, Lee’s lawsuit said, she was assigned to moderate a campus talk by Alicia Garza, founder of Black Lives Matter, and encouraged students to ask questions of Garza, even though Lee’s faculty overseers had forbidden any unscripted questions.

A faculty committee, motivated by Lee’s “dissent from De Anza’s race-based orthodoxy,” recommended against renewing Lee’s tenure in May 2022, the suit said. It said college President Lloyd Holmes refused to dismiss her and ordered further review, but went along with her removal after another committee voted unanimously against her this February without observing her in class.

The Free Black Thought organization maintains a Substack that provides a platform for non-“woke” opinions.

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.

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