A USA Today editor announced Friday that she was terminated over a tweet she posted in reaction to Monday’s deadly shooting in Boulder, Colorado that erroneously blamed a “White man” for the attack.
Hemal Jhaveri, who served as the “race and inclusion” editor of USA Today’s Sports Media Group, was one of many liberals who rushed to trumpet their judgment that a “White man” was responsible for the massacre at a grocery store that left 10 dead.
“It’s always an angry [W]hite man. always,” Jhaveri wrote in agreement with Deadspin writer Emily Julia DiCaro, who had similarly written, “Extremely tired of people’s lives depending on whether a [W]hite man with an AR-15 is having a good day or not.”
After police identified the suspect as Syria-born Colorado resident Ahmad Al Aliwi Alissa, critics accused Jhaveri and the others who assumed the gunman was White of racism.
Jhaveri deleted the tweet, which apparently was not enough to save her job.
“I am no longer employed at USA TODAY, a company that was my work home for almost eight years,” Jhaveri wrote in an essay published on Medium. “On Monday night, I sent a tweet responding to the fact that mass shooters are most likely to be [W]hite men. It was a dashed off over-generalization, tweeted after pictures of the shooter being taken into custody surfaced online. It was a careless error of [judgment], sent at a heated time, that doesn’t represent my commitment to racial equality. I regret sending it. I apologized and deleted the tweet.”
She then shared screenshots of “several high profile alt-right Twitter accounts” who picked up her tweet “as an example of anti-[W[hite bias and racism against [W]hites.” One of the accounts she spotlighted belongs to popular YouTube host and frequent Fox News guest Dave Rubin, who mocked, “I’m shocked and appalled that the Race and Inclusion editor at a major newspaper is, in fact, a racist.”
“There was social media outrage, threats and harassment towards me, and by the end of the day, USA TODAY had relieved me of my position as a Race and Inclusion editor,” Jhaveri explained. “I wish I were more surprised by it, but I’m not. Some part of me has been waiting for this to happen because I can’t do the work I do and write the columns I write without invoking the ire and anger of alt-right Twitter.”
“I had always hoped that when that moment inevitably came, USA TODAY would stand by me and my track record of speaking the truth about systemic racism. That, obviously, did not happen,” she added.
Jhaveri went on to admit that she was “previously disciplined” for her Twitter activity, claiming, “My previous tweets were flagged not for inaccuracy or for political bias, but for publicly naming whiteness as a defining problem. That is something USA TODAY, and many other newsrooms across the country, can not tolerate” and that she was the victim of “micro-aggressions and outright racist remarks from the majority [W]hite staff.”
She alleged instances when she was asked “not to use language that would alienate [W]hite audiences in stories about Black golfers and another instance when an editor asked her “what it was like to be Indian” since his daughter was marrying an Indian man.
“This is not about bias, or keeping personal opinions off of Twitter. It’s about challenging whiteness and being punished for it… Like many places, USA TODAY values ‘equality and inclusion,’ but only as long as it knows its rightful place, which is subservient to [W]hite authority,” Jhaveri concluded.
A spokesperson for Gannett, USA Today’s parent company, told Fox News that the paper was “founded on the basis of diversity, equity and inclusion” and that “We hold our employees accountable to these principles both personally and professionally.”
“While we can’t discuss personnel matters and don’t want to comment on the specifics of her statements on Medium, we firmly believe in and stand by our principles of diversity and inclusion,” the spokesperson added.
*story by Fox News
