Ololade Adeyanju/
Nigerian-born Carnegie Mellon professor, Uju Anya,who wished Queen Elizabeth II an “excruciatingly painful” death, has accused Amazon founder, Jeff Bezos, of inciting violence against her not for her comments about the Queen but for personal reasons.
Anya made the claim an interview with New York Magazine’s The Cut, during which she further defended her position on the Queen.
In response to Anya’s first tweet as the Queen laid dying in Balmoral Castle in Scotland, last Thursday, Bezos wrote to his 5.1 million Twitter followers, “This is someone supposedly working to make the world better? I don’t think so. Wow.”
Anya said about Bezos’ tweet, “He rarely tweets in his own voice, but he took the time to single me out when literally half the planet rejoiced over the news.”
She said Bezos singled her out because she recently met with Chris Smalls, the young black man who led efforts to unionize Amazon.
Doubling down on her earlier comments about the Queen, which earned a Twitter suspension, Anya told the magazine, “Even the crowns she wears are looted, plundered from the lands they exploited and extracted from. The entire treasury is a legacy of thievery that was achieved by murder, by enslavement, and it didn’t stop after independence.”
While also announcing her return to Twitter yesterday evening, Anya, an applied-linguistics professor at the Pittsburgh, said her job at the prestigious university is safe despite her the outcry that trailed her comments about the late British monarch.
“From what I’ve been told, there is no plan to sanction or fire me, and my job is not in jeopardy. My university leadership showed very clearly they did not approve of my speech; however, they stand in firm support of my freedom of expression on my personal social media,” wrote Anya.
“I am not in battle with Carnegie Mellon University. As the letters of support from the students, faculty, staff, and others in my university community clearly show, I am wanted and I belong here,” she added.
After learning the Queen was in her final moments, last Thursday, Anya tweeted, “I heard the chief monarch of a thieving raping genocidal empire is finally dying. May her pain be excruciating.”
The Queen’s death at age 96 was announced later that same day.
She tweeted further, “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.”
After the backlash against her tweet – including Twitter removing it from the site – Anya told NBC that her mother is from Trinidad and her father is from Nigeria. She described herself as “a child of colonization” whose perspective on the monarchy was shaped by the Civil War in her father’s country of origin.
“Rebuilding still hasn’t finished today,” she told the outlet, adding that Queen Elizabeth II represented “the cult of white womanhood.”
She continued, “There’s this notion that she was this little-old-lady grandma type with her little hats and her purses and little dogs and everything, as if she inhabited this place or this space in the imaginary, this public image, as someone who didn’t have a hand in the bloodshed of her Crown.”
Despite the statement Carnegie Mellon put out distancing itself from what it called Anya’s “offensive and objectionable” messages, the university has now evidently informed her there will be no further action from them.
Also, a letter written by university students defending Anya reads, “Public condemnation of her tweet provides no institutional protection from violence and places her in a precarious position, ignoring a long history of institutional racism and colonialism.
“Rejecting calls for ‘civility’ that are frequently leveraged against the marginalized to silence dissent, we express our solidarity with Dr. Anya and reject the tone-policing of those with legitimate grievances.”
Expressing her gratitude to those who have supported her, Anya wrote, “You showed me something very important: I have people.”
She also reaffirmed her gay status in subsequent tweets, while thanking those who did not use that to judge her.
“My people, thank you. All this love you send to me, I receive and return it. As you’re here saying me being gay doesn’t matter, or you won’t disown me, please, I beg you, can you find the same grace for the LGBTQ people in your lives? Can you please love us like we love you?”
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