When the Palace announced that the Queen’s health has deteriorated, Uju Anya, an Associate Professor of second language acquisition at Carnegie Mellon University, US, tweeted: “I heard the chief monarch of a thieving raping genocidal empire is finally dying. May her pain be excruciating.”
She added: “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.”
Bezos, the Amazon founder wrote: “This is someone supposedly working to make the world better? I don’t think so. Wow.”
Uju responded to Bezos: “Otoro gba gbue gi (May diarrhoea kill you). May everyone you and your merciless greed have harmed in this world remember you as fondly as I remember my colonizers.”
Not only Jeff Bezos and some other Twitter users criticized her, the University where Prof Anya lectures, Carnegie Mellon University, also issued a statement dissociating itself from her comments on the queen.
Twitter has since taken down Prof Anya’s tweet’s account.
But, thousands of people, a mix of academics and alumni from various institutions in the U.S. and beyond have signed a petition defending Prof Uju Anya, saying, she is a highly accomplished scholar and a force for diversity, equity and inclusion in the field of linguistics. (Photos: LIB)