A professor who describes herself as “antiracist” defended comments she made after the death of Queen Elizabeth II, criticizing the monarch and wishing “her pain be excruciating.”
Uju Anya, a Carnegie Mellon University professor, became the subject of intense scrutiny after posting a now-deleted tweet on Thursday that she “heard the chief monarch of a thieving raping genocidal empire is finally dying.”
“If anyone expects me to express anything but disdain for the monarch who supervised a government that sponsored the genocide that massacred and displaced half my family and the consequences of which those alive today are still trying to overcome, you can keep wishing upon a star,” Anya posted in another tweet on Thursday.
‘ANTIRACIST’ COLLEGE PROFESSOR SLAMMED FOR TWEET CELEBRATING QUEEN ELIZABETH II’S DEATH
In a follow-up interview with NBC News, Anya pointed to her lineage as a “child of colonization” — her father was born in Nigeria and her mother in Trinidad, but they met in England in the 1950s as colonial subjects sent to university.
“In addition to the colonization on the side of Nigeria, there’s also the human enslavement in the Caribbean,” she told the outlet. “So there’s a direct lineage that I have to not just people who were colonized, but also people who were enslaved by the British.”
In another tweet posted on Thursday, Anya insisted she did not wish for the queen to be dead but instead hoped for “an agonizingly painful death like the one she caused for millions of people.”
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CMU officials later issued a statement in response to Anya’s tweet, noting it does not “condone the offensive and objectionable messages.” However, the university has not punished the professor, emphasizing that “free expression is core to the mission of higher education.”
Anya has faced controversy before over her online statements, and the Foundational Black American organization wrote a petition to remove the professor from the university for using an ethnic slur referring to “cotton pickers” or “wild animals.” As of Saturday, the petition has 1,488 signatures.
