USA Today has fired race and inclusion editor Hemal Jhaveri after her comments in the wake of the Boulder, Colorado, shooting. The firing raises the question of what USA Today expected when it embraced race-obsessed politics in its sports section.
Jhaveri immediately claimed that it is “always an angry white man” who commits a mass shooting, one of many people who decided to make the shooting about race before it was revealed that the shooter was a Syrian immigrant. Jhaveri said in a Medium post that she was let go the next day for her tweet and that USA Today had previously found a couple of her tweets “problematic,” including one where she “called out a reporter’s white privilege.”
Jhaveri goes on to allege a series of racial microaggressions from USA Today editors before claiming that in her time at the outlet’s sports subsection For The Win, “my most important work focused on tackling systemic racism and sexism within sports.” The toxic, race-obsessed politics that led to Jhaveri’s offending tweet (and her accusing everyone noticing it of being “alt-right”) are exactly the same as what USA Today wanted her to push in her content, so why did it fire her?
For The Win had previously published Jhaveri’s pieces shaming leagues like the NHL for not fully embracing Black Lives Matter. She agreed with NBA coach Doc Rivers that the police officers at the Jan. 6 Capitol riot were racists who would have been far more violent with a black crowd. Her final piece, before being fired, essentially demanded that the NCAA expel Oral Roberts University from its membership for being an evangelical school.
Jhaveri constantly demanded that sports leagues and athletes fall in line with race-obsessed, social justice politics. She shamed those who didn’t. This was her role at For The Win. This is precisely what USA Today asked for when it decided to let racial politics consume its sports coverage.
Jhaveri was a perfect representative of what USA Today has decided to embrace in its sports coverage. Even in its main sports section, the website bemoans the imagined victimhood of former NFL player Colin Kaepernick and touts and concurs that “race always matters in America.”
USA Today obviously panicked in the wake of Twitter backlash, another cowardly surrender to a social media mob that likely would have had little, if any, effect on the website’s readership. Jhaveri’s tweet was obviously racist, but it’s an outgrowth of the same politics she pushed constantly in her pieces and of what USA Today has incorporated into its sports coverage. Ideally, the outlet would recognize this and go back to apolitical sports coverage. Don’t hold your breath.
