USA Today has fired its “race and inclusion” editor for incorrectly stating on Twitter that it was an “angry white man” who opened fire and killed 10 people at a supermarket in Boulder, Colorado.
“It’s always an angry white man. always,” Hemal Jhaveri wrote in her March 22 post, not long after the tragedy. The assertion was made in response to a post from Deadspin writer Emily Julia DiCaro, who wrote in the immediate aftermath of shootings at three massage parlors in the Atlanta area that she was “extremely tired of people’s lives depending on whether a white man with an AR-15 is having a good day or not.”
She also revealed that she is “no longer employed at USA Today,” a company she has been with for almost eight years, following a social media onslaught of accusations of her anti-white bias and calls for her to be fired.
While saying she “regretted sending” the post, Jhaveri labelled her critics as “alt-right” and “bad faith actors.” She then complained that her former employer has failed to support her when she faced alleged “threats and harassment.”
The former editor moved on to claim that she had to deal with “constant micro-aggressions and outright racist remarks from the majority white staff” at USA Today. She went even further to allege that she was fired as a result of her white supervisors’ attempt to comfort the news network’s white audiences.
“As a columnist and editor, I’ve had to walk the fine line of advocating for diverse and better stories, while also realizing that the comfort of our white audiences needed to be kept top of mind,” Jhaveri wrote. “On social media, that is what I failed at. There is nothing so offensive to some readers as calling out white supremacy.”
“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.
