DEI director at California College canned for not being woke enough

A director of diversity and inclusion at a California college said she was ousted for questioning key tenets of progressive ideology.

She accused De Anza College, a community college, of impeding her work and failing to renew her contract, Inside Higher Ed reports.

Tabia Lee, who was faculty director for the college’s Office of Equity, Social Justice and Multicultural Education, said there was a laundry list of ideological reasons for her release, but performance wasn’t one of them.

For one, she refused to use the term “Latinx,” the genderless term for Hispanics that progressives push.

One poll showed 98% of Hispanics reject the term or find it offensive.

Lee also objected to the inclusion of land acknowledgements, which requires people to confess to stealing indigenous land, and she claimed her refusal to join a network for socialists led to her sacking.

Lee said that over the years, more and more ideologies were being pushed, with a single, nameless ideology at the forefront, an obvious reference to socialist communism.

“I was told that [I] was supposed to only advance what at that time I was calling a third-wave antiracism ideology,” Lee said, according to Fox News.

The Higher Ed report includes a cartoon featuring a successful black man wearing a professional business suit and saying, “I’m not oppressed.” Opposite the black man in the cartoon is a gay white man, wearing a scarf and a red t-shirt with the image of communist murderer Che Guevara, along with the words, “You are a disgrace to your people!” Lee, who is black, says the cartoon got her in hot water when she shared on social media.

Lee said that despite the tenure committee being reconstituted after she complained about it being used to target her, the damage already done by petty academic infighting was too extensive to repair her reputation.

Through her experience, Lee has become even less favorable toward racial and gender equality ideologies, saying they cause “deep discomfort” to the very people progressives claim to care about.

“I no longer participate in gender pronouns because I find that the same toxic ideologies around race ideologies are now being advanced under gender ideologies,” Lee said in a statement published by Inside Higher Ed. “I also find that the constant obsession with pronouns and declaration of pronouns causes deep discomfort for individuals who identify as gender fluid or who struggle with gender dysphoria.”

Previously California law had allowed jail time sentences for people convicted of using the wrong preferred pronouns for gender fluid people. A California court, however, subsequently found the law unconstitutional.