Dr. Tabia Lee’s Ideas On Race and Racism are Dangerous (to the Establishment)
It’s a good thing she lost her job as the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Director at a community college... and gained a much wider platform
Note: Every Wednesday, I am reposting articles from my banned Medium account. This article was originally published on March 20th, 2023.
Tabia Lee, EdD, is the co-founder of Free Black Thought. Last week, Dr. Lee was denied tenure and relieved of her duties as the Faculty Director for the Office of Equity, Social Justice, and Multicultural Education at Foothill-De Anza Community College in California.
Dr. Lee’s punishment was due to a long list of crimes against the establishment. As a fierce opponent of so-called anti-racist orthodoxy, she advocated for considering the perspectives of all different groups in society, even trying to organise a ‘Jewish inclusion’ event on campus. Additionally, she declined to join a ‘socialist network’ and refused to use so-called ‘gender-neutral language.’
Dr. Lee was accused, in official documents, of a “persistent inability to demonstrate cooperation in working with colleagues and staff,” and an “unwillingness to accept constructive criticism” as a result of her actions. It is alleged that she disrespected a founder of the Black Lives Matter movement. What, the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) director was thinking while on the job? Sacrilege! Fire her, now!
I find it appalling that l have to describe Dr. Lee as a ‘woman of colour.’ After all, I didn’t describe Slavoj Žižek as a ‘Caucasian man’ in a previous text, as that would be ludicrous. Dr. Lee is a thinker, a doer, and should be defined by her ideas and accomplishments rather than her innate characteristics. That’s what truly matters.
I won’t dwell further on the particulars of her dismissal because what really attracted me were her ideas. This is not a ‘Black DEI woman got fired, gotcha!’ story. It’s a story of how she is proof that intelligent life exists on the DEI planet.
She is proof that there is intelligent life on the DEI planet
But her innate characteristics — which are ‘woman’ and ‘person of colour’ — are not entirely irrelevant, as they provide context for understanding the challenges she may face in the pendulum of her intellectual life, from people being suspicious of her because of her race to people being suspicious of her ideas because of her race.
Unlike the recent case of Prof. W. Vincent Lloyd, whose situation was an example of wokeness gone wrong, Dr. Lee’s case is one where the wrong person was punished for holding wrong ideas, as noted by Erec Smith, who has suffered a similar fate.
“Race Ideology-in-Practice”
What truly captured my interest was this text. Written as an academic essay, it serves as a masterclass on racialist ideologies and offers solutions for something I previously thought was impossible: doing DEI right. It is truly eye-opening, and I highly recommend reading the full text and subscribing to her Substack:
Dr. Lee is a critic of what she sees as the current “third wave anti-racist reckoning” in America, where the various approaches to addressing the issues of race and racism are being concealed from society as a whole, for the benefit of a cabal of “race(ist) hustlers,” who have profited from the “neo-reconstructionist raci(al/st) reckoning” that began in American schools.
In her work, Dr. Lee employs two essential concepts: race(ism) — to indicate that “race is a product of racism;” and raci(al/ st) — a normalised attitude that promotes thinking and speaking in racialised terms. This attitude is a reflection of an indoctrination that misrepresents our humanity and undermines our ability to question race-based ideologies.
Dr. Lee’s approach, known as ‘skeptical eliminativism,’ posits that race is not a biological phenomenon or a social construct, but rather a concept that was created to justify racism itself. I can see where she is going here, as racism is an eminently Illuminist creation, when man replaced God at the centre of the universe. And not just any man, but a particular type of man.
That was when they started measuring crania to ‘assess’ intelligence and rewriting the history of Western Civilisation to fit a racialised view of the world, which would yield the terrible consequences we saw two centuries later. The counterparty to that? Those whom Dr. Lee calls the “neo-reconstructivists” (such as Ibram X. Kendi, Robin DiAngelo, and Joy DeGruy), who she characterises as:
“race(ist) hustlers [who] have become dominant in educational discourse and beyond, threatening to push us backwards and further into the deeps of racial strife and division [due to] a maniacal focus on racialization of all people and things […] that promotes the reification of race and racism as a zero sum game.”
Ouch! She fired a shot that could ruin the funeral. It’s a closed casket for neo-reconstructivism now. However, her work appears to be less about proselytising her own views and more about drawing society’s attention to the fact that “there are innumerable race ideologies that have been used, are in use, and could be used should we be interested in moving ahead more meaningfully toward the professed goals of diversity, equity, and inclusion.” In her text, she dissects four of them:
She identifies the DEI departments, which have become ubiquitous in Western academia and corporations, as the battlehorses for neo-reconstructivists seeking to “suppress and exclude alternative frameworks” in favour of an ideology “largely rooted in deterministic, reductive, and/or explanatory understandings of race(ism)” whose “focus on raci(al/ st) data is the architecture and part of the toolkit of American race(ist) indoctrination.”
Any “deviation from, questioning, or dissent about” neo-reconstructionist fundamentalist orthodoxy opens the offender up to “vicious slander, libel, and ostracization,” such as what happened to her. Dr. Lee points to the “deprofessionalization of teachers” as creating:
“an entire generation of American teachers that largely unquestioningly followed scripted curricula […] handed down to them by [outsourced] experts […] in the form of DEI consultants”
Dr. Lee establishes that “as parents and community members become more informed about race ideologies, their questions about the ideologies in practice in students’ learning environments are rising,” with a warning that:
“Teachers that uncritically adopt and implement pedagogical practices without knowing their roots may experience or promote adverse impacts on the lives of students and thereby communities; notably […] teaching and learning practices that are rooted in race(ism) have not bettered the lives of students”
She does not subscribe to the ideas that “education is colorblind or that culture disappears from the learning environment.” Instead, she seeks to elevate culture and ethnicity as “pro-human” rather than “pro-racism,” noting that “racial equity” is not a neutral term, but rather one that is “loaded with ideological understandings of race, racism, and equity.”
She sees those ideas as underpinning a “toxic absolutism” and is alarmed at the effects of “harmful concepts and pedagogies,” where the “presentation of a balanced view of race ideologies is too often suppressed or ignored.”
The Universal Value of the Black American Experience
“Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery
None but ourselves can free our minds
[…]
How long shall they kill our prophets
While we stand aside and look?
Ooh, some say it’s just a part of it
We’ve got to fulfill the book”
Bob Marley, Redemption Song
Of course, Bob Marley was Jamaican, but he wrote songs that are universal, just like Dr. Tabia Lee’s ideas on race and racism (to which she credits Sheena Mason and Carlos Hoyt). They work whether you are Black, White, Asian, or Native because you don’t have to be any of these things to appreciate them. Dr. Lee’s ideas appeal to common human intelligence.
But make no mistake, they are inserted in a context, which is the racism that resulted from Mercantilist actions on Illuminist ideas. Like when Tupac rapped that “the blacker the berry, the sweeter the juice,” her ideas are gifts to the world from a powerful culture that emerged from unspeakable monstrosities.
So Dr. Lee’s views on race and racism are indeed dangerous to the establishment of racists that run DEI these days. But when they tried to shut her down, they ended up giving her an even more powerful voice.
In ways, I’m happy this happened to her because I believe that more people (like myself) are now familiar with her ideas. And this certainly is not the last we will hear from her and her fascinating and refreshing perspectives on DEI, as her platform grows.
On the occasion of firing her, Foothill-De Anza Community College’s board wrote in a report that they “did not expect that Lee would be able to improve in either of those areas.” I guess they made a mistake that they will regret.
Resources
Dr. Lee maintains a “Race Ideologies Resource” website that includes interactive dialogical activities and resources for exploring race ideologies. It may be used by DEI professionals, faculty, staff, and students.
She hopes that “all will share and use these resources widely to unpack the hidden, unexamined, and unspoken ideologies of race and racial equity that influence our educational experiences, policies, and daily interactions with one another.”
Dr. Lee gave her account of the facts in a video produced by the Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism.
Thank you Cauf... not sure what happened to the article on medium but I sure am glad to see it here.