USA Today editor fired for calling Boulder shooter 'angry white man' says firm 'subservient to white authority'
A journalist who was fired by USA Today for a tweet in which she blamed the Colorado supermarket massacre on an "angry white man" has now accused the network of being "subservient to white authority". Hemal Jhaveri, former race and inclusion editor for USA Today, apologized for the "angry white man" tweet, chalking it up to an "error of judgment". However, she later claimed she was the victim of “alt-right Twitter accounts", The Sun reported.
Ahmad Al Aliwi Alissa, a 21-year-old Syrian-born American, was identified as the suspect accused of gunning down 10 people at the King Soopers grocery store in Boulder, Colorado, on Monday, March 22. But Jhaveri prematurely tweeted in the immediate aftermath of the shooting, "It's always an angry white man, always.”
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“Extremely tired of people's lives depending on whether a white man with an AR-15 is having a good day or not," she wrote in response to a tweet from Deadspin author Emily Julia DiCaro. When police revealed the shooter's identity, Jhaveri scrambled to delete her tweet from the platform, but it was too late. The backlash would eventually cost her a job and ironically elicit accusations of racism against her.
Jhaveri later apologized on Medium, revealing that she had been fired. However, she did not shy away from attacking her former employers. “It was a dashed off over-generalization, tweeted after pictures of the shooter being taken into custody surfaced online,” wrote Jhaveri. “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.”
According to her, there was “was social media outrage, threats, and harassment towards me, and by the end of the day” the paper “had relieved me of my position as a Race and Inclusion editor”.
"I wish I were more surprised by it, but I’m not,” she continued. “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.”
Jhaveri admitted she was "previously disciplined" for her posts on Twitter. "My previous tweets were flagged not for inaccuracy or for political bias, but for publicly naming whiteness as a defining problem,” she said.
Speaking to Fox News, a spokesperson for Gannett — USA Today's parent company — said that the paper was "founded on the basis of diversity, equity, and inclusion".
"We hold our employees accountable to these principles both personally and professionally,” they said. "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." Nonetheless, the disgraced journalist accused USA Today of falling short when it came to supporting "diverse voices" at the network.
"So many newsrooms claim to value diverse voices, yet when it comes to backing them up, or looking deeper into how white supremacy permeates their own newsrooms, they quickly retreat," Jhaveri wrote. "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," she added.