For decades Chinese, Hispanics, Japanese, Italians, Africans, etc. were all stereotyped in the worse possible way. Look at how Chinese are represented in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, a “classic”. It goes on over the years, “Long Duk Dong” anybody? People are now surprised that all of these minorities “are so sensitiveness”, “they have no sense of humor”, “outrage culture”.
Our high school had a number of cases of antisemitic and racist graffiti and such recently. At a rally to deal with it, a local rabbi said something that all of you people who have never been an oppressed religious of racial minority should think about. He said that, for people with a long history of oppression, this sort of activity brings on the feeling of “oh God, not again”. For anybody with that history, every time something like this happens you never know whether this is an isolated occurrence or the beginning of a new wave of oppression. As a Jew, I grew up with the history of Jewish communities settling, enjoying a generation, or even a few generations, of life without oppression, which invariably ends when some fanatic religious of otherwise Antisemitic ruler or ruling party rises, and the Jews lose everything. It happened with the Crusades, with the Reconquista, with the dismantling of the Lithuanian-Polish Commonwealth, with the Dreyfuss case, and with the rise of the Nazis in Germany, to name a few more well-known cases.
Every time that something like this pops up, there is that thought “Oh no, not again”. For people of the majority, it seems like nothing, since it is nothing, for them, because they don’t really remember all the stereotypes, all the discrimination, all the little and large acts of bigotry. For the minority targeted by it, it’s not an isolated little event, it’s tied directly to a long history. So stop thinking that “If I was Asian, I wouldn’t be offended by this”, because you have absolutely no idea what your thought processes would be if you were, in fact, Asian.
The reason that universities, corporations. etc. are required to take somewhat extreme actions is to demonstrate that they are not reverting to the way they were a decade or so earlier.
Now, regarding this case. I’m on the wall. If this is merely the professor actually reporting what she heard, removing her is an overreaction. As some have said, it’s “shooting the messenger”, since it was the other faculty members who were actually racist, and she was trying to be “helpful”, albeit in a heavy-handed and tone deaf manner. On the other hand, if she had already posted something similar, and if there is an indication that she has a tendency to invent other people and attribute her own attitudes and complaints to them, that is different.
As for the latter, anybody who ever taught college students has had the experience of some entitled lazy kid who doesn’t like something, finds something difficult, etc., coming and saying “WE think that your homework is unfair”, “THE STUDENTS think that your instructions were unclear”, etc. So it’s not all that uncommon.