You will recall that in a post a few days ago I mentioned a recent USA Today column by Hemal Jhaveri, that paper's sports "race and inclusion" editor - yeah, they have such a position - as one of several illustrations of how off the rails post-America has become with regard to identity politics militancy. She asserted that Oral Roberts University has no place in the NCAA March Madness tourney, much less making it to the Sweet Sixteen. She characterized the school's adherence to sound Christian doctrine regarding human sexuality as "hate."
I guess these days that's not something glaringly unusual. Lots of writers at lots of outlets have similar views.
But USA Today has subsequently canned her. It seems she got the ethnicity of the Colorado mass shooter wrong:
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.
"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's flirted with getting in trouble before over her views on whiteness:
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.
Well, toots, sometimes life's lessons have a bit of a sting to them. Wherever you land next, maybe try to get basic facts right in your pronouncements, even if they're just on social media.
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