Editor's note: This article includes tweets containing vulgar language.
Even before Queen Elizabeth II was officially confirmed dead, her haters were dancing on her grave. We're not just talking random Twitter users, but a verified professor, Uju Anya of Carnegie Mellon, as our friends at Twitchy highlighted throughout Thursday. While many current and former world leaders, including from the United States, have sent their condolences, those Australian politician Mehreen Faruqi's rang hollow, as she brought up colonization in a tweet, and then restricted replies.
Condolences to those who knew the Queen.
— Mehreen Faruqi (@MehreenFaruqi) September 9, 2022
I cannot mourn the leader of a racist empire built on stolen lives, land and wealth of colonised peoples.
We are reminded of the urgency of Treaty with First Nations, justice & reparations for British colonies & becoming a republic.
Then there's the media. The New York Times even had an op-ed ready to go criticizing the queen after her death, this one by Harvard's Professor Maya Jasanoff. They were thoroughly criticized on Twitter for such timing.
When it comes to Professor Anya's tweets, we're not just talking about how she wished suffering on the queen, which she did, something Jeff Bezos was shocked and appalled enough about to weigh in on. That tweet in question was bad enough for Twitter to take down, though as Kyle Becker pointed out, it was because Twitter acknowledged it was making the left look bad, and should thus have been left up.
The tweet in question read "I heard the chief monarch of a thieving raping genocidal empire is finally dying. May her pain be excruciating."
Professor Anya's tweet responding to Bezos is still up, though.
Otoro gba gbue gi.
— Uju Anya (@UjuAnya) September 8, 2022
May everyone you and your merciless greed have harmed in this world remember you as fondly as I remember my colonizers.
Other tweets from the professor still remain criticizing the queen, including those using laughing emojis about what would soon be her death. There are also plenty more retweets of other users taking a similar tone.
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.
— Uju Anya (@UjuAnya) September 8, 2022
Absolutely! Coming here to insult me as if that will get them knighthood?????? Did I kill the queen? No. But she certainly killed my people.
— Uju Anya (@UjuAnya) September 8, 2022
Anya went even further though, as her tweeted replies to users taking issue with such disrespect show her resorting to crude sexual remarks as comebacks.
You mean like your pussy?
— Uju Anya (@UjuAnya) September 8, 2022
If only you were as concerned about your wife’s orgasms as you are about mine.
— Uju Anya (@UjuAnya) September 8, 2022
Her dick riders will never see it that way. The woman and her family literally bled the world.
— Uju Anya (@UjuAnya) September 8, 2022
Professor Anya's bio on the school's website, which is similar to her own website, states in part:
I am a scholar of language learning and Black experiences in multilingualism. My primary fields of inquiry are critical applied linguistics, critical sociolinguistics, and critical discourse studies examining race, gender, sexual, and social class identities in new language learning through the multilingual journeys of African American students. I also have expertise in diversity, equity, and inclusion in instructional practices and curriculum design, language study abroad, applied linguistics as a practice of social justice, intercultural communication, and service-learning in secondary and university-level language programs.
Noteworthy courses she's taught include "Race, Gender, Sexuality, and Social Class in Second Language Learning" and "Language Diversity and Cultural Identity." Undergraduate tuition at Carnegie Mellon for the 2022-2023 school year costs $59,864, with resident students being able to expect spending $80,540 per year.
Books that Anya has written include "Racialized identities in second language learning: Speaking blackness in Brazil" and "Racial equity on college campuses: Connecting research to practice."
Carnegie Mellon addressed the professor's tweets Thursday afternoon, which seems to have angered both sides, based on the reactions.
A statement regarding recent social media posts by Uju Anya. pic.twitter.com/NinpPa4rZg
— Carnegie Mellon University (@CarnegieMellon) September 8, 2022
When it comes to Maya Jasanoff, it does not appear she's tweeted about the queen, though a Twitter account under that name has no profile picture or cover photo, and is locked down. Thus we have her words published in a guest essay to go by, "Mourn the Queen, Not Her Empire."
Halfway through the second paragraph of her piece, she writes:
...But we should not romanticize her era. For the queen was also an image: the face of a nation that, during the course of her reign, witnessed the dissolution of nearly the entire British Empire into some 50 independent states and significantly reduced global influence. By design as much as by the accident of her long life, her presence as head of state and head of the Commonwealth, an association of Britain and its former colonies, put a stolid traditionalist front over decades of violent upheaval. As such, the queen helped obscure a bloody history of decolonization whose proportions and legacies have yet to be adequately acknowledged.
Even when it comes to the essay's acknowledgment of where the British crown has tried to make amends with its colonies, it is not enough. And oh yeah, Brexit is also thrown under the bus:
In recent years, public pressure has been building on the British state and institutions to acknowledge and make amends for the legacies of empire, slavery and colonial violence. In 2013, in response to a lawsuit brought by victims of torture in colonial Kenya, the British government agreed to pay nearly 20 million pounds in damages to survivors; another payout was made in 2019 to survivors in Cyprus. Efforts are underway to reform school curriculums, to remove public monuments that glorify empire and to alter the presentation of historic sites linked to imperialism.
Yet xenophobia and racism have been rising, fueled by the toxic politics of Brexit. Picking up on a longstanding investment in the Commonwealth among Euroskeptics (both left and right) as a British-led alternative to European integration, Mr. Johnson’s government (with the now-Prime Minister Liz Truss as its foreign secretary) leaned into a vision of “Global Britain” steeped in half-truths and imperial nostalgia.
It's not merely the opinion section of The New York Times worth criticizing. The outlet also thought it necessary to put out a piece reminding "In the U.S., Queen Is Mourned by Those Who Were Never Her Subjects."
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