Last month I wrote about a black professor’s experience teaching a seminar for a group of high school kids about race and the law. Professor Vincent Lloyd had taught a seminar like this before for the Telluride Association and it had been a good experience. But the second time around he found himself “trapped in anti-racist hell” thanks to “Keisha,” the person assigned to be his teaching assistant. Keisha quickly radicalized his students and turned them against one another (two students were voted out by the others) and against him. “The students had all of the dogma of anti-racism, but no actual racism to call out in their world, and Keisha had channeled all of the students’ desire to combat racism at me,” he wrote in his account for Compact Magazine.

Today, Compact Magazine has published a similar first-person account written by another black education professional. Tabia Lee was, for for a little over a year, the faculty director for the Office of Equity, Social Justice, and Multicultural Education at De Anza Community College in California. After getting the job, Lee quickly learned that questioning “the tenets of critical social justice” was unacceptable.

For instance, simply attempting to set an agenda for meetings caused my colleagues to accuse me of “whitespeaking,” “whitesplaining,” and reinforcing “white supremacy”—accusations I had never faced before. I was initially baffled, but as I attended workshops led by my officemates and promoted by my supervising dean, I repeatedly encountered a presentation slide titled “Characteristics of White-Supremacy Culture” that denounced qualities like “sense of urgency” and “worship of the written word.” Written meeting agendas apparently checked both boxes…

As I attended more events and spoke with more people, I realized that the institutional redefinition of familiar terms wasn’t limited to “white supremacy.” Race, racism, equality, and equity, I discovered, meant different things to my coworkers and supervising dean than they did to me. One of my officemates displayed a graphic of apples dropping to the ground from a tree, with the explanation that “equity means everybody gets some of the apples”; my officemates and supervising dean praised him for this “accurate definition.” When I pointed out that this definition seemed to focus solely on equality of outcomes, without any attention to equality of opportunity or power, it was made clear this perspective wasn’t welcome. “Equity” and “equality,” for my colleagues, were separate and even opposed concepts, and as one of them told me, the aspiration to equality was “a thing of the past.”

Lee held a workshop in which she presented two different racial justice outlooks. The first was Ibram Kendi style anti-racism and the second was taken from the Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism. This second view is one Lee describes as “a more open-ended view of oppression and privilege, wherein human destiny is determined by human choices.” The point of her workshop was to find points in common and to try to bridge a gap which she believed was already present among the staff. Later, during her tenure evaluation, one of her evaluators claimed that her presentation of Kendi’s views was deeply offensive.

Anything short of lockstep adherence to critical social justice was impermissible. “Criticism” was only supposed to go in one direction. Contextualizing my colleagues’ views and comparing them to other approaches to the same issues, much less criticizing them, was “dangerous”; my supposed failure to “accept criticism” was, simply put, a refusal to accept without question the dogmas these colleagues saw as beyond criticism.

Eventually, a group of her colleagues went to the Board of Trustees and demanded Lee be fired. Speaking of her time at De Anza Community College, Lee writes:

For those within the critical-social-justice-ideological complex, asking questions, encouraging other people to ask questions, and considering multiple perspectives—all of these things, which should be central to academic work, are an existential danger. The advocates of critical social justice emphasize oppression and tribalistic identity, and believe that a just society must ensure equality of outcomes; this is in contrast to a classical social-justice approach, which focuses on freedom and individuality, understands knowledge as objective and tied to agency and free will, and believes that a just society emphasizes equality of opportunity. The monoculture of critical social justice needs to suppress this alternative worldview and insulate itself from criticism so its advocates can maintain their dominant position. Protection of orthodoxy supersedes all else: collegiality, professionalism, the truth.

It sounds like a miserable experience though the dogmatism isn’t surprising if you’ve been paying any attention at all to how proponents of Kendi-style critical theory operate. They use the same methods to maintain control that they used to gain it in the first place, ruthless group suppression and deplatforming of critics.