You have to be pretty stupid to opine publicly about the race/ethnicity of a mass shooter before his race/ethnicity is known. You have to be very stupid to base such an opinion on the obviously false claim that mass shooters are “always” of a particular race/ethnicity. And you have to be world-class stupid to risk your professional career on such an assertion.
But that’s what Hemal Jhaveri, then the “diversity and inclusion editor at USA Today Sports,” did following last week’s mass shooting in Colorado. She tweeted, “It’s always an angry white man [who does this]. Always.”
Unfortunately for Jhaveri’s career, the Colorado shooter was Ahmad Al Aliwi Alissa, an Arab-American who was born in Syria. As anyone who pays attention knows, this guy is not the only man of Middle Eastern heritage to have gone on a shooting spree. Recall Omar Mateen, the Florida nightclub gunman and Nidal Hasan, the Fort Hood killer. Jhaveri also overlooked Floyd Lee Corkins, a Black who tried to shoot up a Washington, D.C. think tank.
USA Today fired Jhaveri. She promptly played the victim card, including pathetic moans about “microaggressions” she allegedly experience at USA Today.
Doubling down on stupid, Jhaveri complained: “There is always the threat that tweets which challenge white supremacy will be weaponized by bad faith actors.” But Jhaveri’s problem wasn’t her “challenge to white supremacy.” I take it that USA Today paid her to regurgitate such “challenges.”
Her problem was that the tweet about the Colorado shooting exposed her as a fool with a high degree of animosity towards white males.
Because Jhaveri’s beat was “diversity and inclusion,” her firing was fully justified. If Jhaveri had been, say, an attorney in a law firm, it would have wrong to fire her (though her colleagues would be justified in wondering how the firm ever hired anyone this dumb). Firing her from most jobs for her tweet would have been cancel culturist.
But Jhaveri’s job was, in essence, to write about race and ethnicity. I won’t say it was to write intelligently about these subjects because this beat typically is devoted to promoting the mindless “woke” narrative.
Ironically, though, this sad reality made it all the more imperative that USA Today let Jhaveri go. By displaying her stupidity and anti-white male animus, she lost her viability as a race monger for a newspaper that claims to be serious. She needed to be replaced by someone equally woke who hasn’t beclowned herself.
Those concerned with maintaining traditional standards of journalism couldn’t support employing a writer as biased and injudicious as Jhaveri. Those concerned with promoting wokeism couldn’t support employing someone whose cover was so badly blown.
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