A “race and inclusion” editor at USA Today complained on Friday that she was fired after mistakenly tweeting that the Boulder supermarket shooter was another “angry white man” — but she’s blaming the resulting “alt-right” outrage, not just herself.
“It’s always an angry white man. always,” ex-editor Hemal Jhaveri had said Monday in her offending tweet — which she admitted in a Medium post on Friday had been “careless.”
“Extremely tired of people’s lives depending on whether a white man with an AR-15 is having a good day or not,” said the tweet, which noted that just days earlier a white gunman had shot up three Atlanta area massage parlors.
The tweet turned out to be inaccurate — police soon identified the Boulder suspect as Syria-born Colorado resident Ahmad Al Aliwi Alissa — and Jhaveri soon apologized and deleted her tweet.
But not before the tweet sparked an online onslaught of accusations that she was a race and inclusion editor who is actually a “racist” hater of white men.
“It was a dashed off over-generalization, tweeted after pictures of the shooter being taken into custody surfaced online,” Jhavari said in Medium of the tweet.
“It was a careless error of judgement,” she added, “sent at a heated time, that doesn’t represent my commitment to racial equality. I regret sending it.”
