A “race and inclusion” editor at USA Today complained on Friday that she was fired after mistakenly tweeting that the Boulder supermarket shooter was another “angry white man” — but she’s blaming the resulting “alt-right” outrage, not just herself.
“It’s always an angry white man. always,” ex-editor Hemal Jhaveri had said Monday in her offending tweet — which she admitted in a Medium post on Friday had been “careless.”
“Extremely tired of people’s lives depending on whether a white man with an AR-15 is having a good day or not,” said the tweet, which noted that just days earlier a white gunman had shot up three Atlanta area massage parlors.
The tweet turned out to be inaccurate — police soon identified the Boulder suspect as Syria-born Colorado resident Ahmad Al Aliwi Alissa — and Jhaveri soon apologized and deleted her tweet.
But not before the tweet sparked an online onslaught of accusations that she was a race and inclusion editor who is actually a “racist” hater of white men.
“It was a dashed off over-generalization, tweeted after pictures of the shooter being taken into custody surfaced online,” Jhavari said in Medium of the tweet.
“It was a careless error of judgement,” she added, “sent at a heated time, that doesn’t represent my commitment to racial equality. I regret sending it.”
But the cat was out of the bag. Or as Jhaveri put it in Medium, she had invoked “the ire and anger of alt-right Twitter.”
“There was social media outrage, threats and harassment towards me,” Jhaveri complained.
Jhaveri was fired from her position of “Sports Media Group Race and Inclusion Editor;” she also edited the subsection “For The Win.”
“This is not about bias,” she claimed on Medium, “or keeping personal opinions off of Twitter. It’s about challenging whiteness and being punished for it.”
Of USA Today, she said, “Sending one wrong tweet that ended up in the hands of Sean Hannity on Fox News though, was enough for this publication to turn tail.”
She ended the piece, “Like many places, USA TODAY values “equality and inclusion,” but only as long as it knows its rightful place, which is subservient to white authority.
