All Episodes
Previous Next
Jan. 18, 2024 - Epoch Times
01:13:34
[FULL EPISODE] Tabia Lee: The DEI Educator Who Was Fired After Daring to Challenge the Status Quo
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
I'm a black woman, you know, and I'm being called a white supremacist.
I've never seen teachers calling each other names like that.
The broader system is just being destroyed and dismantled right before our eyes.
And we're complicit in that because we're not saying anything.
In 2021, Dr.
Tavia Lee was hired to direct the Anza College's Office of Equity, Social Justice, and Multicultural Education and to reduce the wokeness of the institution.
I just went beyond the smaller bubble to the larger community and said, who wants to work on actual inclusion and doing some things we've never done here before?
But after two years, Dr.
Lee was terminated for her heterodox perspectives and inquiry-based approach to DEI. I've lost everything, and that's tough.
But what I've gained is so many people coming and saying, thank you.
And to me, that's worth everything.
Because that's what it's going to take to take our nation back.
This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Yanya Kellek.
Davia Lee, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders.
Thank you.
Tabia, I was really fascinated to read your article in Compact magazine, kind of an incredible adventure you've had coming in as the DEI educator at De Anza College.
It turned out that you had a very different approach to diversity, equity and inclusion than was the default approach.
So tell me about what happened.
Tell me, who is Tabia Lee?
Well, thank you for the opportunity, Jan.
I just want to share with you that I am a lifelong educator, and I really mean lifelong educator.
I was part of a gifted and talented program when I was in elementary school, and the teachers didn't quite know what to do with us, and so we spent a lot of time like Playing Oregon Trail and being used as peer tutors.
So that's when my commitment to teaching really began.
But during that time in my childhood, not everybody was so kind.
And so I had experience with the very same people I was helping actually teasing and bullying me.
And so it was at that early age that I had this commitment to the outsider, the outcast, the person who's misunderstood.
And that followed me throughout my teaching career and my adult lifehood.
Got my formal education and became a teacher.
I taught in East Los Angeles Public Middle Schools for a decade, teaching English, civics, and social studies with gifted English language learners.
And at that time, that was something that in California we had an English only through the law.
The only language of instruction could be English.
And some of the teachers thought that you couldn't possibly be gifted if you didn't have English language proficiency.
So I was breaking down those misconceptions even with my colleagues in Los Angeles Unified School District doing teacher trainings around giftedness as neurodiversity.
So in early times, doing technology trainings for teachers, in addition to my teaching responsibilities.
So I've always served in this role of teacher support as well as actual practitioner.
And I've always had to do that kind of meta thinking, meta thought about those topics, how to step outside of the pedagogy and unpack it for people.
So this has been something that has been part of my life work, a commitment to elevating different groups who may be on the margins, a commitment to inclusion of everyone in a space.
So that's what led me, you know, to eventually this position, this tenure track position at De Anza College, where I was, after a very rigorous interview process, selected to be their faculty director for the Office of Equity, Social Justice, and Multicultural Education.
This is a faculty role.
Even though my doctorate is in educational leadership and administration, I've always been a lead from the trenches kind of person.
So I've always been a teacher leader and a co-learner and someone who is very committed to not just making myself a better teacher, but sharing the things and the tools and the resources I have found with other teachers so that they can be their best possible teaching selves is what I call it.
So how is your DEI approach different from the conventional one or the one that seems to dominate today?
So DEI today, there's definitely a default perspective at work, I would say.
It's something that I didn't know going into the work that I did at De Anza College, but I discovered it as you go into an environment and you start to realize I'm a little bit different than what other folks are saying.
And my perspective's a little bit different.
And I started to try to figure out what were the differences?
Where were they philosophically, pedagogically, And I started to just really reflect on that because I wanted to understand why I seem to be so different than the people that were making the decisions around my tenure position there.
Okay, so let's begin.
You were actually specifically hired.
From what I recall, the administration was worried that things had gotten too woke.
So you were actually invited to come to try to deal with that.
So they were actually hiring someone who thought differently.
They knew that ahead of time.
I want to touch on that.
But it just strikes me that a number of our viewers have actually been asking me How do you even define woke?
And we've done this in a number of shows with a number of guests on American Thought Leaders.
But I actually saw one that you came up with.
Why don't you tell me, what is woke?
How do you define it?
I think it's something that's very contextual.
So that's why whenever anyone uses that term, I ask them, you know, please define what you mean.
So the working definition at De Anza, when I was applying there as a candidate, When they said, your office is a little too woke, and we'd be looking for someone to kind of rein that in, I asked them, what do you mean by that?
And they said, often faculty, when they visit the office, they are accused of being racist.
They're told that they're practicing racist pedagogy, that their teaching is wrong, that they are wrong, that their beliefs are wrong, and it makes people feel very uncomfortable, and they don't want to go to the office as a resource, as it should be.
And when that definition was given, I said, you know, by that definition, I'm definitely not woke.
You know, I'm someone who tries to bring together people and to help people to identify common points so we can best serve our students.
So in that context, in the interview, it was said as accusing people of being racist, accusing teachers of being racist constantly.
And telling them that their pedagogy was wrong.
As I started to work with my office mates, they had a different definition of woke.
And to them, woke was being awake to social injustice and taking action against it.
So their definition was very positive.
Before I had come on, they even had workshops like how to be woke and get paid.
What I discovered as we think about social justice and what is social justice was that I was coming from what I've identified now.
I didn't come in with that definition as a classical approach to social justice.
And my office mates and some of the key people in leadership were working from what I identify as a critical social justice.
And they're very different.
In terms of what are the outcomes that you're seeking for society?
So for example, from a classical social justice, you would be really emphasizing things like equality of opportunity.
And that's very different from a critical social justice approach.
They're emphasizing, like, what is a just society?
That's one where we have equal outcomes.
One perspective is trying to manifest equal opportunity, and another is really trying to manifest equal outcomes.
And what are the things that can happen to all of us as a result of that, to our society at large?
How does that even look?
Is that something that we would want for society?
And I think the default in many spaces right now is a critical social justice approach, where we're emphasizing equality of outcomes.
And that's going to look differently in terms of personalizing learning, standardization of learning, and all of these other things that I've been very committed in my life I'm going to read what you actually wrote in your article as the definition.
You said a worldview that understands knowledge as relative and tied to unequal identity-based power dynamics that must be exposed and dismantled.
That's as good a definition as I've come across.
Yes, and I would add to that, it's one that also sees racism as systemic and present in every interaction.
I discovered that when our Academic Senate was drafting up a resolution on racial healing, they called it.
And one of the lines in there was, we acknowledge that America is a systemically racist country and that white supremacy, it's founded on white supremacy.
And I made a suggestion in the document and I said, well, can we add that it's founded on the principles of fairness and equality?
And there was a backlash there.
They said, absolutely not.
How could you challenge that?
We're founded on white supremacy.
I said, well, not everyone believes that, you know, and myself included.
I'm one of the people who's saying, you know, we're founded on fairness and equality.
Whether we've lived up to that or not, we can debate.
But to say that we're founded on white supremacy and that racism is everywhere and systemic, that's problematic.
It's a definite worldview.
So a lot of my work at DeAnza was trying to Raise awareness of these ideologies, even in the simple statements we make when we're talking about making progress with each other and how do we frame that and how do we frame policy around it.
The words that we're using, the phrases and assertions we're making about the foundations of society are critical to that.
And you wanted to just explain to people that there are these different ways of viewing the question of social justice.
And they're foundationally different, and you wanted to educate on that topic.
And that alone was unacceptable.
Yes, that's one of many things that was deemed unacceptable from the start.
Me even saying that there's many ways to do the diversity equity work, that different teachers use different frameworks and that's okay, that was a no-no to say as well.
I had my tenure review committee members actually say, you're leading people to danger, you're undermining the work we've done here.
And then I would say, well, what were you expecting me to say?
And they could never articulate to me, you know, what I should be saying, just that I wasn't saying the right thing.
Just by asking questions or saying there's more than one way to think or do things.
There's multiple perspectives around the topic.
So why is it seemingly only one way?
Well, from what I heard from my tenure review committee members, they had a long history at that particular institution of doing equity work.
Part of my foundational aspects of it was to define what even equity means.
And I was told I shouldn't be asking that question either.
It should just be known.
But there was no institutional definition.
And so I come from a sociology background and Words and meanings and linguistics and so forth are so important to me to understand what we mean when we say a term or a word.
So I was doing initial work around, you know, can we define equity?
What does it mean to you?
What does it mean to this person or that person?
And that's when I was told that I shouldn't even be doing definitional work.
We shouldn't be doing that.
We should just be doing the work.
But no one could tell me what the work was.
And when I would ask them to define equity, they would show me graphics and pictures.
Apples falling from trees, and they would say equity means everyone gets some.
Another one was people standing on boxes, and they said it's leveling the playing field.
So it was never a direct definition that was related to education or educational supports.
It was all Socially focused instead, not academically focused.
And I noticed that in many of the things during my time there.
It's almost like you were the only one that didn't know the answer.
Yeah.
Well, they were of the same accord, basically.
It's an environment, Jan, that it's maintained by the actors that are in it.
So if you are someone who is questioning You're quickly cast out.
So then you have everyone just saying, yes, and we agree.
Now, who's the person who's the architect behind that?
I never could discover.
I was really poking and trying to find out, you know, why did we use certain terms?
Why were we renaming whole groups of people without their consent, for example, with these X terms on the names of racial categories?
You know, when did we start to, you know, say that this is the focus of our equity work?
And where did it come from?
Was it a resolution?
Like, I'm a historian as well, so I'm trying to see what are the footprints that have been there?
How was this collaboratively developed?
And I could never discover that, but there was a definite unison of voice.
We just don't do that.
You know, a singular person would say, we just don't do that here.
That's not how we do it.
And then everyone else would just kind of Be quiet and say nothing to oppose it.
And here's Lee, the lone questioner, who's saying, but why?
But where did it come from?
Even that was unacceptable to the people, and it was tightly guarded.
I had people who came to my office hours who made veiled threats after I was initially questioning, and they said, you know, We've worked hard to advance equity here, and no one's going to get in the way of it.
And I thought that was very strange.
And I said, well, why are they perceiving me as a threat?
I'm new, you know.
What have I done in my past or things of that nature?
But just the fact that I was a questioner was a warning sign to some of the key folks.
Of course, you can see it in hindsight.
When it was happening, I couldn't see that immediately.
You walked into this so innocently.
It's kind of amazing because this has been a centerpiece of discussion, at least from my vantage point, for a very long time.
But you kind of walked in with these innocent eyes wanting to Yeah, I don't know if I was so much innocent, Jan, as I take an inquiry-based approach to everything.
And so when I come into a situation, I'm never assuming I know everything or that the knowledge I have is a reflection of the reality that's there.
And so that's why I started off at De Anza doing needs assessment conversations.
This was during the pandemic, and I actually ended up doing over 60 hours of needs assessment conversations, which is pretty unprecedented even for me.
I don't think I would have had that much access to people if they hadn't been locked to their computers, you know, and not able to go anywhere or do anything.
But the benefit of it was that I talked to faculty, staff, and administrators, and I got to ask them, what are the needs here?
What are the strengths?
What are the weaknesses?
What do we need to work on?
And I was warned about this idea of, you know, not a lot of viewpoints here.
And so that's why I knew that was the path I needed to take, was to bring people together in dialogue to talk about, what are we meaning?
When we say certain terms, so that we could all get on the same page, if you will, and then be able to, you know, best serve our students.
Even if we have different perspectives, we could identify some points of commonality.
And that was, you know, the thrust of my work initially was around that, and it came out of my needs assessment conversations where people were saying, you know, we have this long history, we're rooted in equity, but no one's defined what that means or, you know, how that is in practice.
I wish more people took that approach to things.
Me too.
If I can comment.
Yes, yes.
I welcome the comments, you know, because I think that we learn from each other.
And if you're in an academic institution, it seems to me like that should be the primary thing that we're doing, right, is engaging colleagues who are like us and different.
Having access to diverse viewpoints, I think that's how we sharpen who we are and what we stand for as individuals and as an institution as well.
And I think that that's foundational.
When my job description was to lead a transformation around equity, social justice, and multicultural education, I had to know what was there and what were the perspectives that were there and what were the strengths and the needs that we had.
And so I was very committed to uncovering that.
As I started to do that, some people didn't want the uncovering, and they didn't want the clarity.
When I started talking about diverse scholars and understanding of race, that was, again, I was told that I was leading people into danger.
What I was really doing, Jan, I was sharing what I had learned, because before this, I wasn't a race scholar or anything of that nature.
I didn't consider myself that.
I'm just an educator.
I've taught civics, social studies, English.
I never was studying race in depth and what does it mean to work under race ideologies.
But I saw constantly the mention of race all the time in every setting.
And so I started to say, well, what are some ways of viewing this?
And I actually discovered the work of a scholar.
Her name is Dr.
Sheena Mason.
And when I discovered her work, that was the first time in my four years of teaching and learning that I ever knew that there was something called philosophies of race.
I'd never heard of that.
I didn't know there were different ways to view race and racism.
I wanted to share that with my colleagues and with students as well.
The way that she laid out the different philosophies of race in her own And that was so different from the mainstream understanding of race.
I grappled with that book.
I grappled with the concepts.
It was things that I'd never encountered, as I mentioned.
And to me, that's transformative.
Like when you have been doing something your whole life, just kind of unquestioningly, and then suddenly you have these questions sparked by the scholarship of a person who's laying out these frameworks.
It was wrong of me to ask questions like, when we say anti-racist, what do we mean?
What philosophy or movement are we rooting ourselves in?
Because there's been several waves of anti-racism, if you will.
And I just wanted clarity around that.
And I was told, you know, don't ask that.
We're committed to anti-racism.
It's right there in the document.
Just, you know, that's us as an institution.
Me being told that I shouldn't cite certain authors and You know, other things that I've never encountered in the educational sphere.
No one's ever told me to be mindful of my citations.
Usually folks are like, oh, I can use your references as a resource and go read up, you know, myself.
And that's usually how I structure my references so someone else could trace what I've done and see like, oh, does this measure up?
You know, did she make valid conclusions?
Like, that's how I've been taught to do scholarship.
The thing that really struck me as you're talking here is this attempt to speak about a whole group of people as if they have the right somehow to speak for them.
That's very characteristic of Yes, that was a way of thinking that I encountered quite often, even early on.
I can give you examples.
Academic Senate in higher education, that's where the faculty comes together, usually by their discipline.
You would have a representative that's voted from the sociology department, from the biology department, from all the departments of learning or disciplines, if you will.
That's who usually comprises your academic senate, and they make decisions about the academic institution.
Part of my tenure at De Anza, there was this push to make what are called racial affinity groups voting members of the Academic Senate.
I found that to be very odd because I didn't know what racial affinity groups had to do with academic disciplines and why they needed a separate representative to come to the Academic Senate and be a voting member.
And so I asked those very questions.
I said, you know, why are we making this change?
And then I started to question the structure of the racial affinity groups there, because I noticed that there was only three.
And there are many more, if we're going to think of those tick boxes, right, there's many more tick boxes in the community, and this is a public community college, than just three.
And so why were three groups of people only being voted, granted voting rights, or being considered for that?
I asked, you know, is this legal?
Because there's not representation.
Then I was questioning, are the groups themselves representative?
Because I know for a fact, Some people choose not to involve themselves with those groups.
And so why are we saying that these groups would represent the Black perspective, for example, I'll just be very frank on it.
They call it Latinx or Latinx perspective.
Just me asking those questions, John, was considered an attack.
They said I was attacking the racial affinity groups by questioning their legitimacy.
By questioning why they should have voting rights, and then it became this issue of everyone should be able to vote and have voting rights, and then, you know, me pointing out that certain groups didn't even have a group to represent them, that became problematic as well.
So that's one example.
Also, when I first came on, we had what's called a Women, Gender, and Sexuality Center on our campus.
And that was part of my Office of Equity, Social Justice and Multicultural Education.
It's so long, but I've learned to say it.
And so the coordinator for that office was saying that they were receiving complaints about white faculty not feeling comfortable coming to the Women, Gender and Sexuality Office.
And my team and my supervising dean, they said, well, what are you going to do about it?
And they were like, no, we're not going to do anything.
This is how we've structured this office to be.
It's for BIPOC, they called it, people.
That means black, indigenous people of color.
And they said, you know, we've made this center for BIPOC people, and that's who should be here, and that's who's welcome here, and we're not going to change anything we're doing.
They could tell that I was just kind of like, what?
You know, this strange universe.
I popped in and they were like, Lee, what do you think?
And I told them, from my perspective, we're a public school.
Anyone should be able to come into that women, gender and sexuality center.
Maybe there's a resource or a book.
They want to come somewhere and feel like they're not being judged.
They just want to explore things.
They may want to change their, you know, major.
Whatever it may be, I don't think it should be by their race.
It should be by, I'm curious about these three topics that this office represents.
And I was shouted down and told, you know, I was attempting to whitewash the history of the office.
I was told white people have the rest of this campus and they don't need our office too.
And it was, again, a fissure from the very beginning in between how I viewed being a welcoming and belonging place and how, you know, the critical social justice view of being welcoming and belonging and who should be welcomed and feel like they belong.
So you're reminding me of this whitewashing and whitesplaining is another term.
So I've heard these terms.
You know, of course, I've read a little bit of what does that actually mean?
When the terms were used against me, I had never encountered them before.
So when I started at DeAnza with my team, I just want to give people a little context.
I asked them, did they have a strategy or a tool or a way of tracking agendas and their team meetings and so forth, and they didn't.
So after a couple of weeks of just informal meetings, remember I'm charged with leading a strategic transformation and Of the campus.
And so I said, you know, we need to have structure and we need to kind of, you know, do something different.
So I made a Google Doc and I said, you know, we can use this to track agendas.
Maybe we can collaborate.
I'm so new here.
I don't know what things you normally do and where I can fit in the flow.
We can just contribute asynchronously so we're not, you know, loading our time up with meeting.
And as I was explaining it just like that, that's when one of the staff members stopped me and said, you know, stop what you're doing right now.
What you're doing is you're white speaking and you're white explaining and you're being a white supremacist.
You're being transactional.
And when they stopped me like that, everyone else on the team had these very smug looks on their faces.
Like they were like, yeah, get her, you know?
And it felt bad.
It felt like pejorative.
I said, I have not come in judging you or calling you any names.
I said, please don't call me a name like that.
That feels very bad to me.
And everyone in the Zoom room looked at me as though I was the offender for saying, please don't call me that.
And you know, that feels very bad what you said.
And from that moment on, it was like every action I took, it was a confirmation.
Yep, she's a white supremacist.
And I didn't know what they meant.
And that they were meaning something totally different than I had ever experienced or heard of until I was going to their workshops.
And I saw this graphic that they would display over and over again.
It had like poison bottles.
And it had, like it said, white supremacy characteristics of being on time, being objective, either or thinking, all of these other just like characteristics and I'm a black woman.
I'm being called a white supremacist.
That had never happened in my entire teaching career.
And not only that, I'd never seen teachers You know, calling each other names like that.
I've never seen teachers doing name calling in a professional setting.
You know, I don't want to make it sound like DeAnza is a unique place that's only happening here at multiple community colleges in California.
It's like a system thing where they're upholding this white supremacy culture and the idea of it as a truth and using it to screen people out and test people and see if you fit well or not based on if you are exhibiting certain characteristics or not.
And these are characteristics that are what I would tell my students to be a successful person and a scholar.
You know, these are the characteristics.
You would be on time.
You would be objective.
You would be curious.
You know, you would be all of these things that are qualities and traits of a young scholar.
That's what I call it.
So to have it be something that's relegated to whiteness, and then what does that mean about the viewpoint of the people who are promoting this?
What do they think of, quote, people of color?
They're not all of those things.
So that means I'm not supposed to be objective.
I'm not supposed to be on time.
That was the expectation of me.
How disappointing.
So a number of our viewers might be familiar with a variant of this graphic.
We zoomed in a little bit as we've been talking here on some of these bottles that you're describing, but not too far from where we're recording right now, the National Museum of African American History had an infographic that essentially Had these exact same points, just a little bit of a different design that created controversy here in DC. I think it was removed for these purposes.
How incredibly bizarre that these things would be somehow relegated to being a supremacist position.
There's actual trainings that we send our staff to.
They're held by actually a private university, University of Southern California, And they focus on decentering whiteness.
My supervisor was sending me emails initially saying, I want you to go to this training.
And I would look at the topic and it said, decentering whiteness throughout the system.
And I'm like, what?
Why would someone ask me to do that?
And then as we started to get into discussions about what should we be doing or not be doing, that was used as a justification.
Like, no, we shouldn't do that because that's not decentering whiteness.
We don't focus on this or that because that's not decentering whiteness.
Now, this was not in the job description.
This is not in any written institutional mission or vision.
But this is what is told person to person.
And if you are not in alignment with that, that's when you must be eliminated, vanquished.
You're not allowed to be in this space.
What I would love to see people do is just be transparent.
If you want someone to come in, to do your DEI work, and you say, I want you to take a decentering whiteness approach, and you'll use the white supremacy culture characteristics to do your work, that should be out in the open.
And then candidates, right, can make a decision and say, oh, that's what I do.
I will go in gladly and do that.
I was told at one point that I wasn't representing the ideas.
I was hired to represent with fidelity.
If I had known that that was what I was supposed to do, and if it was described to me, then as a candidate, you know, of course, I would know, like, that doesn't square well with me.
Like, that's not the kind of work I do.
I like to bring people together and serve our students in our community.
I take a servant leadership approach to things.
And so that wouldn't mesh well with me to represent a singular ideology or anything like that.
But in practice, that's what's taking place, and not just at that college, but in many colleges and spaces.
And so often, These things are held up, like the slide, for example, in every workshop that was led by those individuals, that slide would be present.
And they would talk about the relevance of the slide to the workshop materials.
So that's their framework that's being used.
And it saddens me because This is a public school, and so we should really be about the community that surrounds the school.
That's how it should be, and everyone should feel represented and that they're, you know, included.
It's like everybody knows what it is, but you're not allowed to talk about it.
It's like Fight Club, isn't it?
I think we're similar generations, so you know what I'm talking about.
Yes, nobody talks about Fight Club.
But why do you think it's like that?
I can only speculate.
When I made the charts, for example, where I started laying out the race ideologies and what their perspectives were, that had never been done in that space before.
And one person actually told me, you're making us look bad.
You're disparaging my worldview, they said, by putting it next to that.
So I said, if your ideology or worldview can pass the muster of being compared to another, then maybe you have something there.
I said, what are you afraid of?
To have that view out and compared to others, do you think that it won't stand up?
Is that what's offensive?
Because to me, as a scholar, that's what I teach my students to do.
We make Venn diagrams, we compare things, we make charts.
Comparison's part of critical thinking.
And so to tell me that your ideas should not be compared and should not be put next to the ideas of another, that's problematic.
And so that's what gets me labeled as not being cooperative.
And that was one of the statements that was used in my termination.
That I did not cooperate and it was wrongful of me to do that.
Explain to me what exactly happened ultimately.
Actually, maybe before that, you mentioned this Board of Trustees meeting that you say you've never seen anything like it before.
I want to roll a bit of a clip to it.
Dr.
Lee has taken positions that directly contradict her role as Faculty Director of Equity.
She has repeatedly advocated to remove the language of anti-racism from institutional documents Arguing that anti-racism is harmful and divisive ideology that prevents instructors from being able to implement diverse pedagogy and violate academic freedom.
Dr.
Reed, refusing to do the work she was hired to do, is actively seeking to undo the years of hard work towards anti-racism that so many of us seem to contribute to.
Dr.
Lee's conduct has effectively alienated the majority of affinity groups that she was hired to collaborate with in her role as faculty director of equity.
However, the impact of her actions extend beyond just affinity groups.
Early on in the academic year, she sent out a statement to the entire campus via multiple listservs That created a chilling effect on people's willingness to discuss matters directly with her, and that contributed to an unsafe and hostile working environment.
We are sharing these concerns with the Board today because we believe that Dr.
Lee's intentions to rewrite campus and district policies jeopardizes and sets back the progress the College has made in developing a racially just, inclusive, and affirming campus environment.
We are concerned about the impact of Dr.
Lee's ability to disrupt and pull out equity for her own personal agenda or gain and worry that if allowed to remain in this role, she will continue to undermine the commitment to anti-racism and equity that our district has fought so hard to affirm.
In fact, her words and actions have already caused irreparable damage to many relationships across the campus that needs to be affected in her role.
Dr.
Lee has slowed our campus progress on anti-racist initiatives and work.
She has alienated affinity groups from the equity office initiatives under her leadership.
She has alienated members of the campus equity office from the office itself.
And she has created an unsafe environment for sharing concerns with the direction of equity work under her leadership.
So now that we've watched this, why is this so unusual in your mind?
Yes.
For me, Jan, that was such an unusual thing.
I'm someone who's been in education a long time.
I watch a lot of board meetings.
I know it's kind of boring for many people.
But public comment is usually used to raise public awareness about things.
This was an instance where you had multiple speakers.
It was a coordinated public comment.
So when each one gets three minutes.
So it was 15 minutes of calling for A teacher's termination.
And in this case, my termination.
And the reasons that were being given, they were not clear violations of any kind of harassment or discrimination policy or things that I had done that showed that I was professionally unfit or anything of that nature.
The statements that were made, like that comment that I was elevating groups of people who should not be elevated, They made statements that I said all lives matter, which actually is a statement I've never made, and just trying to show that for some reason I was inappropriate just in my essence of being and the activities I was doing, that I wasn't representing what I was hired to do with fidelity, another statement made during that time.
I'd never seen a teacher called out and their termination demanded.
And this was during my first year.
So I was at DeAnza for two years.
This was first year in the spring this happened.
And it was right after I did my Heritage Month activities.
And I did some activities around Jewish inclusion and anti-Semitism education.
And so the only things that I had done were things of that nature.
So for people to be saying that those things were inappropriate when they were collaborative efforts and community-based efforts and me involving staff and students and community partners and doing the work that needed to be done based on the needs assessment conversations that people had told me, this is where we need to go next.
Tell me a little bit about this anti-Semitism work that you were doing and some of the reactions to it.
Yes.
Unfortunately, when you're in an environment where anti-Semitism is deeply entrenched, which is what I discovered at that particular institution, there's a lot of resistance to doing any kind of restorative or reparative work around that.
And when I first came on, I connected with the Hillel of Silicon Valley and they actually came to the Equity Action Council and they said, you know, we're very concerned about our Jewish students.
There's no Jewish student organization.
They're kind of been pushed underground.
There's been some BDS movements from the student government and that we're deeply concerned about and our students were shouted down and we noticed that you all have a standing against racism page and would you please, you know, make a statement about anti-Semitism and combating that and that we want this to be a safe place for our Jewish students and faculty.
That was the ask.
As the people were speaking, One of the staff members was dropping in the chat things like, Black Lives Matter, Black Lives Matter.
Here's another resource.
And they were giving resources that were to anti-Zionist organizations.
If you want to learn about Jewish culture, go to this website or that website.
And I found that deeply offensive.
Took it back to the team meeting, so I raised that and I said, you know, I found it very offensive that when we had guest speakers from the community, one of our staff members was putting in the chat Slogans and things that have nothing to do with the issue they were talking about.
And then directing to resources that were offensive, because that's not what our presenters were talking to us about.
And the attitude was, well, you're wrong.
You are all sharing resources and we can share resources too.
So I said, okay, fine.
What are we going to do about what's been asked here?
And I was told we aren't going to do anything.
And I said, we're not going to do anything?
I said, they came with the evidence, you know, they showed us the statements from students and so forth.
They talked about what our student government has done.
You don't think there's any need to, you know, address this or do some kind of education around it?
They said, no, we are decentering whiteness, and that doesn't have anything to do with what we're focused on.
And I said, okay.
So again, it's that decentering whiteness.
I needed to come up to speed.
What are they meaning?
What I discovered from the ideology is that certain groups of people are, at this point in time, deemed white, and so they are the oppressor.
And to them, Jewish people are oppressors.
They're in the oppressor category, according to their matrix of domination and oppression.
Every person or individual, they are part of a larger group, and that group is either a victim or an oppressor, and you are...
Stuck in that status for your entire life.
You can never move from it.
You can never move beyond it.
You're born as a victim or an oppressor.
And this is what's being taught in our K-12 schools directly to students now.
This is what's being taught to faculty members.
This is how you should view your students and tell them that they are.
And this is how we're supposed to view our world.
And to me, I had never told any of my students, you're a victim or you're an...
I don't use those terms.
I always talk about, you know, like you can accomplish anything.
You can, you know, do some hard work and make your dreams happen.
You know, we're different.
We have different cultures and so forth, but we can all work together.
Like that's been my approach to life and to working with people.
So to hear this kind of viewpoint and to have that promoted was so different.
And It ended up with them saying, we're not going to do anything.
Not only that, but they said, we've also gotten recommendations from CARE. So that's the Council on Islamic Relations.
And they said, and we didn't do those either.
And I said, well, could I see those recommendations?
Like, I'm really genuinely there, Jan, to, if a community member has brought a recommendation, I want to see it.
And, like, I went away.
Like, is this valid or invalid?
What does the rest of the community think?
Should we act?
They never showed me those recommendations from CARE that they supposedly had, and they were using that as a counter to why we shouldn't do Jewish inclusion and anti-Semitism work.
So I never saw those, never got to access it, but I did end up making our first Arab American Heritage Month at De Anza College and our first Jewish American Heritage Month with our Heritage Month workgroup.
I just moved on.
When I saw that my supervising dean and my staff were like, we're not going to do anything, and they actually didn't do anything, and they didn't support the efforts, I ended up doing a Jewish inclusion and anti-Semitism summit, bringing several guest speakers in.
I just went beyond the smaller bubble to the larger community and said, who wants to work on actual inclusion and doing some things we've never done here before?
And so that's what I did.
And I found people willing.
They were like, Lee, you're so refreshing.
Like, this is what we've needed for so many years and no one's had the courage to do it.
And I'm like, but why?
If that's what this office is for, why has no one done it?
And I saw that the stranglehold that was there, you know, the fact that you have your supervisor and your office mate saying, we're not going to help.
And they really didn't help with any of those efforts.
And I'm the kind of person like, if I need to, you know, I can...
Be solo and reach broader.
And that's exactly what I did, you know, because that's what was needed.
It was a need that was in the community.
I couldn't just, you know, stand idly by after hearing from the community members who came concerned, you know, and saying, please help us.
I'm there to help and I'm there to serve.
So I had a duty at that point to move forward, and I did.
Some pretty nasty things were said about me.
I was called a dirty Zionist.
That lets you know what kind of environment it was.
It was an environment where this is our norm, this is how we behave, even though it flies in the face of just common decency and professionalism.
How do you understand Zionism?
Very briefly, just so people know what we're talking about here.
Yes.
So to me, Zionism is a support of Israel and the right of Israel to exist at a base level and a support of Jewish people and their peoplehood and personhood and statehood.
That is it in a nutshell.
Now, I'm giving a very brief definition.
I mean, there's all kinds of Zionism, but in a general sense, that's what it means to me.
And if someone has a problem with that, I would say that's something that we need to educate on and talk about.
I think there's a misunderstanding, what I've encountered, of history among many people.
When we did our Jewish Inclusion and Anti-Semitism Education Summit, it went on for many weeks, and we had a new speaker each week.
This was not publicized on the college calendar.
It was not pushed out to the students so that they could come and learn.
And basically, there was low participation from the actual people that really needed to be in and learning from these experts and scholars that we brought.
A few weeks after that, there was a panel presentation This panel presentation was promoted on all the college networks, on the calendar, so the announcement was put out to students, and the speakers that were coming, they had titles like anti-Israel, anti-Zionist activists, and so forth.
So that's what was promoted over inclusion in anti-Semitism education.
You see a differential treatment.
Of different groups and speakers and so forth.
And this is all in the context of you also organizing an Arab American Awareness Month.
I don't know if that was promoted or not.
No, actually, none of the Heritage...
So I started the Heritage Month workgroup, and I wanted my supervising dean and my staff and everyone to be involved.
They declined, so I went to the broader community, and we took it to the student government.
And we said, this is what we want to do, you know, can we get your support?
And the student government said, this is wonderful.
We support you.
They actually made a little resolution.
They said, we support the Heritage Month workgroup and the efforts for inclusion.
We feel like this is what we need as a college to make everybody feel like they're celebrated, welcomed, acknowledged.
Took it to the Academic Senate and they said, oh yeah, no, we're not going to support that because it seems like this is part of the Jewish stuff that you're doing and you're trying to turn our school into a religious school.
And I said, oh, hold on.
I said, I'm 100% a secular person.
You know, I don't identify as any of the Abrahamic faiths.
You know, I'm just someone here to serve.
And this was a need that was stated.
I said, how could you equate Heritage Month with that?
So when I say that there is an entrenched anti-Semitism, Jan, I really mean...
Based on actions like that.
Like, we're not going to support one thing because you've done this other thing that makes it seem like this is part of that.
And we don't support that.
People are openly saying it.
And it's unfortunate for the students because it makes the environment unsafe.
I'm not talking about safe spaces and this and that.
I mean, it's literally, if you are a Jewish student in that kind of space, you cannot say who you are.
If you support Israel, if you are someone who's proud of your culture, you have to say no to that in order to be accepted by the dominant group here of people that are so-called progressives.
And if you're not willing to sacrifice those parts, you cannot be openly who you are.
That's what I mean when I say unsafe.
That's a space where not everyone can be their most authentic self.
And the calendars have already been deleted.
They're gone from the website.
We had our 2023-24 calendars up, the multi-faith calendar, the heritage month calendar.
The Identity Recognition Days Calendar, they've scrubbed them.
That could have been left as a resource for students and faculty, but it's just an association.
Anything she did must be erased.
It was never here.
And that's part of this toxic ideology.
We only want one perspective shown.
Anything that's contrary to that, it will be deleted.
It will be censored.
It won't be promoted.
We will pretend it never happened.
We will not speak of it again.
And very briefly, what happened in the end?
You said you were terminated.
So what happened?
Yes, I received notice in March that I would not be going to the next phase of tenure.
This was, once again, a unanimous decision that was made.
The first time it was unanimous.
The second time it was unanimous.
The same supervisor overseeing the process each time.
And that person is now retiring, which is...
Great for the college, but not so great for me because they were able to make that last salvo of making sure that I was eliminated.
And each time I received any kind of evaluation that was literally attacking me for ideological reasons, so it was never on her pedagogies.
It was, I disagree with what she's talking about.
And that shouldn't be when you have an academic freedom as a professor.
But I saw that all of that was just writing in a contract.
It didn't matter in practice.
There was no academic freedom if you are not stating the orthodox perspective.
Inclusion has almost become a pejorative word in my mind because how I keep hearing about it in the DEI, in the sort of orthodox DEI way, talking about actual inclusion, which was the work that you were doing.
That's another aspect of this, and this has kind of been a theme, actually, for our discussion, that words are...
Defined differently and in an obscure way that you can't really know unless you really dig in and find out.
This is characteristic of this woke ideology.
Yes, and I would say there's an inversion of words, an intentional inversion of common phrases and words and things that people have said and talked about for years.
So you walk in and you hear like, oh, diversity, yeah, you know, I'm on board with that.
Oh, anti-racist, of course I'm against racism, you know, but that's not what's being meant.
It's not meaning against racism, it's actually...
Meaning you're supporting racism and racist policies when you're working under the framework of Kendi and D'Angelo and what I call the neo-Reconstructionists.
Why I say that term, Jan, is because in the past, race activists and scholars and so forth have tried to reconstruct race to be a positive thing, an empowering thing.
If you think back to the 60s, that's not what's happening now today.
The neo-Reconstructionism is reconstructing race in a very negative way, and it's reconstructing racism and what that means in a negative way as well.
When we talk about that racism can only be power plus privilege, that exempts some whole groups of people from racist actions, and they feel very dignified, even when they're doing the most racist and terrible things So when we start to redefine what these terms mean in a different way,
even than what the legal definition is, In practice, that becomes a very toxic and hostile environment for not just the people that are subjected to it, but for everyone.
It's diminishing all of our humanity.
It's diminishing our ability to connect with one another.
If every interaction I have with you, I'm like, oh, well, Jan said that.
He's racist now.
He showed a sign to me that he's part of that white supremacy culture.
I'm always looking to confirm this bias that's held that's faulty to begin with.
And I'm always looking to confirm in any interaction, oh, he didn't shake my hand, but he shook that person's hand.
He's a racist.
If we're constantly doing that to each other, how can we ever connect and make this world a wonderful place that we all want our future generations and each other to be in?
It's like we've taken this to the extreme and made this a, what used to be like a very esoteric, maybe just with certain professors, it's gone into the broader society.
And it never should have done that.
And now we have to figure out how do we reel back from this and how do we move forward together in a way that helps us to heal because we've done so much damage with embracing this uncritically.
So what is De Anza saying about your termination as you describe it?
Thankfully, I'm really thankful, Jan.
So many members of the community have written to the Board of Trustees on my behalf.
Even other colleagues have written to the Board of Trustees saying, you know, something's happened here.
It's not quite right.
We want an investigation.
Can you, you know, figure out what's taking place?
You know, Dr.
Lee shouldn't be losing her job over these topics for the reasons that are being given.
And so far they've just really dug in and refused to be moved by any of the things I presented.
So each time I would get a negative evaluation, for example, that was based on purely ideological reasons, I would submit rebuttals and supports of my participant evaluations.
And when you look at the two, like what the participants said about the workshop and what the evaluator said, it was like they were at two different things often.
And not only that, all of my workshops that were observed were recorded.
So I would urge the board, like, please look at the recording and see.
You'll see that it didn't happen that way.
But they've declined to do anything objective or facts-based.
It has been completely cast out, and there's no concern of it.
No one's looked at it.
If you remember, one of the things that was stated in this position from DeAnza that's been publicized, which is so embarrassing for me and humiliating as a teacher, that I was not cooperative and not collaborative, and that there was no hopes that I could ever recover from such a deficit.
The majority of Teachers and faculty and staff are decent people.
They've just been so afraid of the intimidation of the silencing, of the casting out.
I even had people who said, Lee, you know, one person who did this before, they're gone.
Like, we don't want you to be gone.
We love your approach.
And some of them would say, Lee, just be quiet.
Be quiet until you get your tenure.
And I'm like, you want me to, like, Not ask a question for four years, and then I'm going to pop out and go like, hi, it's me, I have questions.
It'll be too late.
You know, some of the changes that were happening were transformative in and of themselves.
The voting members of racial affinity groups and so forth that I mentioned earlier, like those are things that can't be changed.
I guess it could if you make a new amendment, right?
But they've changed actual bylaws and so forth.
So these changes are happening rapidly.
The individuals that are part of these groups, they're seizing the moment, if you will, and they really are.
And so I had a lot of warnings about it, and now I am, unfortunately, a poster child of it.
And that's not the poster child I wanted to be.
Now it's said, look what even happened to Lee.
And I'll be used as an example.
For the people who want to keep a tight hold on things there and make sure that this type of thing never happens again.
I was an outsider who was hired in, so we didn't touch on that at the beginning.
But there was an internal candidate who felt entitled to my position.
And this is how this all kind of started.
They were a former student.
And some of the members of my initial tenure committee were their mentor.
And what I say now to friends and so forth is that this person embodied the fruits of their labor because that was the person who called me the white speaker, the white-splainer.
At the beginning they told me, you know, this position was supposed to be mine.
I don't know why they selected you.
I was a student here.
You don't, you know, belong here.
I don't know who you are.
You're going to have a rough ride.
And then Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism came in and they said, Hey, something's off here.
You know, you guys might want to take a second look.
We see some irregularities.
Our legal team is, you know, prepared to defend and so forth.
And so they pulled back from the first year when they were trying to terminate me first year in.
And then I served this second year.
And it was, again, the icing out, the shunning, the silencing.
This whole year has been that.
From all quarters, you know, because it was like a message was sent out.
Like, don't speak to her.
Don't respond to her emails.
So it's like you're in an echo chamber in a bit.
And my solace was the broader community, the majority of the faculty, and the people who would come to me, you know, on one-to-one and say, like, Lee, I support you.
I see what they're doing.
It's so wrong.
I'm sad that they're acting this way.
Like, and these are people who are tenured, right?
We've been there for many years and they would rely on me and like I call it the whisper channel and saying like I can't ask this because I don't want to deal with the headache but I know you'll ask Lee so could you ask the question I think sure I mean I'm ask a question you know it's okay for us a question right and they were like no it really isn't you know and so at one point Jan in my tenure review meeting in this this year I said I'm committed to be here I I'm a product of California Community Colleges.
I was a dual enrollment student.
I went to community college when I was in middle school and high school.
And I took so many credits that I graduated two years early.
I said this is my life coming full circle.
So I plan to retire from here.
I said I am not going to leave.
I said some people have been very mean and they've been very rude.
They've been self-righteous.
And just nasty.
I said, but I have friends here who counterbalance that for me.
I have people who've never engaged with my office who are coming out to workshops, who are getting involved.
I said, I'm not going to be pushed out.
I'm not going to just resign.
I said, you're going to have to do something different.
And they did something different.
I mean, that was a conversation I had with the tenure review committee.
That kind of conversation shouldn't be taking place.
But that was the environment that was created.
And I said, I think a message of this needs to be, we can't just cancel each other.
We can't just tell each other, like, I don't like what you said, so we're not going to work together.
I think you may have this perspective, so I want to destroy your career and your livelihood.
I said, we can't treat each other that way.
And I said, I took this position knowing it's a DEI position.
So I've worked with and through adversity.
I'm okay with that.
It will take time for us to build trust and relation with each other.
But I'm committed to that work.
They didn't come around.
Instead, it was, you know, she's for sure out, you know, unanimous decision to make sure that I couldn't advance further.
That's what that situation was.
But I'm someone who's, I'm very resilient and resourceful.
I'm going to find the good, elevate the good.
We are good, you know, and there's goodness still here, even in the darkest place.
Like, that's just how I was raised and how I've walked through the world.
And I'm thankful for that because You could become very jaded in this kind of thing, you know, and become like a hardened person and I'm going to fight them like they fought me and be their way.
Like, no, you don't have to do that.
You don't have to succumb to that kind of pressure.
You can still be a decent person, a loving person, a kind person.
Keep being yourself, even if the people around you and the context around you is something different.
And I do that by staying grounded, by reaching out to broader community.
One of the orgs I'm with is called Free Black Thought.
I don't know if you're familiar with them.
I'll jump in.
I'm incredibly familiar with Free Black Thought, okay?
And I didn't even fully realize that you were with them until just basically the last few days in some way.
And it's been incredibly helpful to me as an organization for understanding a lot of the issues of the day.
So I'll just put in that plug.
Thank you.
Whoever's on the other side, I'll say to the camera, thank you whoever's on the other side of the Free Black Thought, social media accounts, and the journal, of course.
Anyway, please continue.
Yeah.
Yes, that was one of the organizations that I found.
As I was experiencing all of these things, the shunning, the silencing, the ostracization that was taking place at De Anza, I found, of course, Dr.
Sheena Mason's work through Free Black Thought as well, and then connected with her.
And I actually brought her to De Anza for an in-person workshop at the beginning of this fall.
You know, Jan, I've been asked, why did you stay here?
And the reason why is because when you're doing this kind of work, small changes are great changes.
Like the small change of someone who had never come to the equity office now getting engaged after being on staff for decades.
To me, that's a change that's taking place.
It's small.
It's one person.
Then there was another person.
Then they would bring another person.
That's how you affect a change.
And I knew that.
And of course, my committee members knew that as well.
And that's what enraged them so much.
Because they're like, you're making a change that we don't want to make.
We want to keep the divisions.
We want to keep the victim-oppressor.
We want to keep saying that America is founded on white supremacy and that racism is everywhere and I was bringing perspectives that were saying well There's another way to view that.
And I would say, not all of us here believe what you're saying.
Can we make a space where we can all feel free to talk?
I don't want to talk about how I'm a victim and I'm oppressed and I should feel guilty and we need to make reparations and all of these other things, the grievance-based aspect of things.
That's not what most people want to focus on.
But that's what we're being made to focus on because there's a small minority who's very loud, And intimidating.
And they're bullies.
And it makes everyone else cower and go, oh, you know, I don't want to be labeled.
If I say something, then they're going to tell me I'm on the other side.
And, you know, I'm on the wrong side and I shouldn't be here.
And of course, I want to be here, right?
This is my community.
So if it was up to me, I wish like a judge or someone could come down and say, restore her position.
This person was just getting started.
We're not going to let people bully each other out of positions as a community college.
Multiple perspectives should be here.
It's okay for people to be different.
And let her do the work she was just laying the groundwork for.
It's really just groundwork.
I hadn't even gotten started.
Imagine if, you know, we might just be transforming California if it was given the opportunity.
And I just wonder to myself, how many other times has this happened?
How many other people never even got to raise a hand and ask a question because someone saw their face look like this and they said, get her out of here.
Make their evals disappear.
That's what's happening.
It's a subversion of a whole system to advance this ideology that's so toxic for so many of us.
It's a powerful plea you're making here, and I find myself moved by what you're saying.
It's very much the spirit in which I view the world.
Yet you're out of a job.
What's next for you here?
You know, Jan, when I made this decision to go public, if you will, I conferred with my mentors first.
And they told me, they said, Lee, if you talk about this, You will not get another tenure-track position in California.
They were like, you would have to move states.
You're done.
And I had to weigh that because I have a family.
I have all of these things that I'm working on career-wise.
And the tenure-track, that's why I got my doctorate.
I became a doctorate of education so I could be a professor and be in the academic freedom world and support people.
This was an ideological skimming, a quartering of me, and they're holding me up as an example of why you will comply with us and you won't ask questions.
That wasn't something that felt right to me in this moment in history.
I feel like too many of us were just quietly Resigning, going along, going with the flow, wanting to keep our benefits and our checks coming.
We live paycheck to paycheck.
We don't want to make that a concern for our family or for us, so we just go along with it.
I've even had teachers tell me, I don't go to the Academic Senate.
I don't go to your office.
I teach my students.
I don't get involved with any of this other stuff.
I close my door and I teach.
And that's what so many of us are doing right now.
We're just closing our door and we're making that small impact with our students, right?
But the broader system is just being destroyed and dismantled.
Right before our eyes.
And we're complicit in that because we're not saying anything.
We're not raising a question.
We're not raising an objection.
We're just doing our small little thing in our classroom.
And then the world around us is literally being lit a fire.
And I realized the urgency of it, and I said, I'm going to speak.
I'm going to speak about what's happened, and I'm going to have the courage to do that so that others do it.
Now, what is the consequence?
I have lost my job, my livelihood.
I've lost the tenure track two years that I've put in.
I've lost my health insurance.
I've lost everything, basically.
And that's tough.
But what I've gained is so many people coming and saying, thank you for having the courage.
Thank you for raising the issue.
They've said, You inspired me to ask about my equity policy.
You inspired me to go into my child's school and to ask to see that curriculum and to make a Public Records Act request if needed, if people aren't being forthcoming with the information I'm seeking.
You've inspired me to push back when I wasn't going to and I hadn't in the past.
And to me, that's worth everything.
Because that's what it's going to take to take our nation back.
So I just want to say that inspiring each other, we have to start to ask questions and we have to make the time.
And what I hear, Jan, is a lot of talk about dismantling, destroying, tearing down systems.
What no one's been able to articulate to me yet is what comes after that.
And from what I've experienced and what I've seen, what comes after that is not going to be something that all of us will want for ourselves or for our future.
It's going to be something that...
Is authoritarian, totalitarian, and that is the reverse of everything that we've built.
This is an imperfect experiment.
It is an experiment, a grand experiment, and it's a worthwhile experiment.
It's something that's worth advocating for.
It's worth protecting.
It's worth taking the time to go find out what's happening in your local public school or private school and what's being told to those students and the faculty and the staff there.
And so much has been seized upon in this moment.
You know, people call it the racial reckoning and we're going to right the wrongs of the past.
Maybe we've gone too far, too uncritically.
And now it's time to bring us back to where we can talk to each other.
The civil discourse has almost disappeared.
So we need to get together and talk.
We need to have different perspectives available in a learning environment for our students and for their well-being.
If you have one perspective and one lens to view everything through, that is the definition to me of indoctrination.
When we no longer have critical thinking and multiple perspectives available for people to make their own educated decisions, that's problematic.
That goes against all of the democratic principles and republic principles that we have that are supposed to be guiding us, that as a public school educator, you take an oath to protect the Constitution.
That should be real, and that should be front and center in everything that we do.
What a powerful message.
So how can people reach you?
Yes.
So I do serve as a board member for Free Black Thought.
That's one place you'll always be able to find me.
I do have a website.
It's drtlee.com.
It's just my little personal website that I've always had.
Not much up there.
But I do consulting as well.
And as you kind of touched on before, there's been a lot of people coming to me now and saying, like, we're interested in your perspective.
How would we do this at our school?
What resources could we use?
And so forth.
I've got to meet so many amazing people who are doing things in the DEI world that are not Of this default stuff.
So they're not talking about racism being systemic.
They're not talking about victims and oppressors.
They're talking about human dignity, free will, agency.
How do we join together as communities?
And there's many people doing the work, but they're not mainstream.
So you don't see them promoted.
They're not part of the multi-billion dollar DEI industry.
You know, they're kind of on the fringes.
And that's something that Free Black Thought elevates.
They elevate heterodox thinkers.
Because when we're talking about Victims and oppressors and we're going to make changes towards equity and equal outcomes.
What you don't see is a piece of measurement and accountability to go along with that.
And if you're not having measurement and accountability and evaluation of some sort, then what are you doing with all of the public funding that's going in to fuel these efforts?
How does the public know what's happening with that funding?
And I think that that's something that people need to start looking into and asking questions more about and using Public Record Act and other mechanisms that we still have, thankfully, to ask for that accountability if it's not forthcoming.
So as we finish up, what would be your suggestions to people, parents, teachers, frankly, anybody who's concerned about, you know, these realities in our whole social structure today?
I would strongly encourage people, Jan, to keep asking questions, even if you're the only person in the room raising a hand.
Because often when we're hearing these words, racial equity, diversity, inclusion, many of us have questions about that.
But we're in environments where sometimes some of the people act like no one should be questioning it and we should all be on the same page.
What I've learned is that there are many lenses to view these topics through.
There's not just one.
And so often in so many settings, it's almost like there's a default explanation or understanding of things and that no one questions it because it's repeated so often that we all just say, oh, okay, I've heard that before.
I'll just go along with it.
No one else is questioning it.
If someone tries to tell you that you shouldn't be questioning, then that's your That's the key or indicator, right, that you're on the right path.
Because only in settings that are authoritarian, where there isn't freedom of expression, can you not ask a question.
That's how we learn through dialogue, in communication with each other.
So much of what we see in our world around us right now is one way.
And then we all say, okay, that's the perspective.
This is what the expert has said.
But experts are not perfect or infallible.
They are human beings as well.
And I hear a lot of people talking about cultural humility.
What I would really love to see us embrace in our academic, civic world and everywhere else is intellectual humility.
This idea that not one of us has all of the answers.
We're all exploring and trying to figure out together.
No one has the magic solution, the magic bullet, the magic framework, and we all need to get back to the magic of learning from one another and being in community and dialogue with one another.
Being able to disagree with someone, but still work with that person.
I don't know what happened with that, but it seems like nowadays, if I disagree with you, it's like I want to cancel you, and you know, you shouldn't exist here or anywhere else.
And that's so toxic.
So I'd like to see us get back to more compassion-based relationships.
More communication-based, more dialogue-based interaction, and more of an inquiry-based approach.
And what are some possibilities we haven't even seen yet?
What are some ways that are out there that are being suppressed because we're being told there's one way?
And that's what I would like to see more of, an encouragement of multiple perspectives, of critical thinking, and Sometimes it can feel intimidating, right?
Like, that's the school.
They're the authority.
I shouldn't ask them anything because they're the educators.
They are there to serve you.
You are the public paying public.
You know, your tax dollars is what makes that institution possible.
So they have a responsibility and a duty to answer your questions.
Well, Tabia Lee, it's such a pleasure to have had you on.
Thank you.
Since this interview was recorded, Dr.
Lee has filed a lawsuit against ANSA. We reached out to the community college, which declined to comment specifically, but said faculty members have comprehensive due process and appeal rights.
Thank you all for joining Tavia Lee and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders.
▲
Export Selection