While many around the globe were paying tribute to Queen Elizabeth II upon her death Thursday, not everyone was saddened by her passing.
Twitter removed a tweet by Carnegie Mellon University associate professor Uju Anya that read: “I heard the chief monarch of a thieving raping genocidal empire is finally dying. May her pain be excruciating.”
The tweet prompted outraged responses, including from Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, who wrote, “This is someone supposedly working to make the world better? I don’t think so. Wow.”
A publicist for Carnegie Mellon University told TheWrap: “We do not condone the offensive and objectionable messages posted by Uju Anya today on her personal social media account. Free expression is core to the mission of higher education, however, the views she shared absolutely do not represent the values of the institution, nor the standards of discourse we seek to foster.”
Anya, whose account is still active, also tweeted, “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.”
To a Twitter user who wrote, “This kind of post is not expected from a person of your level. This is not what you say even to your worst enemy,” she responded, “Telling the colonized how they should feel about their colonizer’s health and wellness is like telling my people that we ought to worship the Confederacy.”
To another person offended by her tweet, she wrote, “F— you and your deference to genocidal colonizers.”
Among those who sided with Anja, one person tweeted, “Reminder that Queen Elizabeth is not a remnant of colonial times. She was an active participant in colonialism. She actively tried to stop independence movements & she tried to keep newly independent colonies from leaving the commonwealth. The evil she did was enough,” alongside a video of an elderly Kenyan woman who was “tortured with axes during Kenya’s struggle for independence from British colonial rule.”
Kenya declared independence from the UK in 1963. In February, former British colony Barbados, which achieved independence in 1966, elected its first president, with both Prince Charles and Rihanna attending the ceremonies.
Per her bio on the Carnegie Mellon site, “Dr. Uju Anya is a university professor and researcher in applied linguistics, critical sociolinguistics, and critical discourse studies primarily examining race, gender, sexual, and social class identities in new language learning through the experiences of African American students.”
The vitriol against the late queen is still not anywhere as strong as the outpouring of hatred for former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher when she died in 2013. People who opposed her anti-Labour Party policies shared sentiments such as, “How are you celebrating?”
