Pennsylvania professor under fire for
'white genocide' tweet
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[December 27, 2016]
By Ian Simpson
(Reuters) - A Drexel University professor,
whose tweet that he wanted a "white genocide" for Christmas sparked a
fire storm of criticism from the school and social media users, said on
Monday his comment was satirical.
George Ciccariello-Maher, a white assistant professor of history and
politics at the Philadelphia university, posted "All I Want for
Christmas is White Genocide" on Twitter on Christmas Eve, according to
media reports.
He followed up on Sunday by tweeting, "To clarify: when the whites were
massacred during the Haitian revolution, that was a good thing indeed."
Condemnation lit up Twitter after the comments from Ciccariello-Maher,
an expert on Latin American social movements, were picked up by such
conservative news sites as Breitbart News and The Daily Caller.
"What rock did this cretin crawl out from under?" Sean O'Reilly tweeted.
Twitter user Camz wrote, "You want a white genocide, why not be the one
who starts it and see where you end up. You coward."
Drexel University, a private school with about 26,000 students, said in
a statement on Sunday that it had contacted Ciccariello-Maher to
schedule a meeting about the tweets.
Drexel said that although it recognized the right of faculty members to
express their views, the comments were "utterly reprehensible, deeply
disturbing, and do not in any way reflect the values of the University."
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Ciccariello-Maher said in an email on Monday that the tweets were
only aimed at poking fun at white supremacists and that he and
Drexel had become targets of a smear campaign.
He said that the concept of "white genocide" was used by white
nationalists to denounce everything from interracial relationships
to policies aimed at promoting multiple cultures.
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"It is a figment of the racist imagination, it should be mocked, and
I'm glad to have mocked it," Ciccariello-Maher wrote. Access to his
Twitter account had been restricted on Monday.
He has drawn online support, with a Change.org petition backing him
generating almost 3,000 signatures by Monday.
"Let Drexel know - in the midst of the deafening, organized
troll-storm - that racist trolls deserve no platform in dictating
academic discourse, let alone the off-duty tweets of academics," the
petition said.
(Reporting by Ian Simpson in Washington; Editing by Dan Grebler)
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