‘SUBSERVIENT TO WHITE AUTHORITY’

USA Today Race Editor: I Was Fired for Tweeting About White Mass Shooters

Hemal Jhaveri, the former race and inclusion editor of USA Today’s “For The Win,” had apologized for her tweet in the wake of the Boulder massacre.

Hemal Jhaveri, the race and inclusion editor for one of USA Today’s sports sites, says she was fired over a tweet she wrote in the wake of the Boulder massacre. Before the shooter’s identity and Syrian-American heritage were known, Jhaveri tweeted, “it’s always an angry white man. always.” She later deleted the tweet and apologized—but YouTuber Dave Rubin and other alt-right personalities had already led a Twitter pile on. “It was a careless error of judgement, sent at a heated time, that doesn’t represent my commitment to racial equality. I regret sending it,” Jhaveri wrote in a Medium post.

She accused USA Today of repeatedly taking issue with reporters who “publicly nam[ed] whiteness as a defining problem” and of letting white reporters off the hook for worse transgressions. She detailed racist micro-aggressions previously directed at her by colleagues. “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,” she wrote.