Black DEI Director Fired for Whitesplaining
The idea that black people are always late to appointments and unable to keep to a schedule is one of those racist myths that should have died a natural death a long time ago. And yet it s still with us. Only now, the purveyors of this stereotype are not, in the main, white bigots. Rather, they re self-styled social justice warriors who believe that when anybody even an African American expects a black person to conform to the most basic social norms, they re revealing a deeply held racial bias. Being on time, they would have you believe, is a white thing, and to insist that black people conform to this white norm is to insist on the superiority of the white race.
It is a little crazy that I have to say this, but, no, being on time is not a white thing. Black people are fully capable of reading a clock. And no, when a white person shows up to a 10:00 a.m. meeting expecting to see his black colleagues, he is not trafficking in white supremacy. There is something deeply, deeply backward about the idea that black people cannot be expected to meet these social obligations. There is I ll say it something deeply racist about it. And I suspect that if you told the average black person he shouldn t worry about being on time, because that s not something black people do, things would get uncomfortable quickly.
My guest this week, Tabia Lee, the former DEI director at De Anza Community College, ran afoul of this kind of progressive bigotry when she made the utterly ordinary suggestion to her colleagues that it might be helpful to set an agenda for the semester. For that infraction, she was accused of whitespeaking, whitesplaining, and supporting white supremacy. The fact that Tabia is African American herself seemed not to matter. It was only the first of a series of absurd run-ins with progressive racial ideology, which Tabia details here, that eventually led to her dismissal from her position. It s unfortunate that someone as qualified as Tabia has been effectively ejected from academia for espousing what many people would consider common sense. But maybe Tabia s former colleagues would consider common sense a white thing, too.
Glenn Loury.