A professor from Pennsylvania who previously expressed the wish that Queen Elizabeth died a “excruciating death” has reiterated her controversial remarks, saying on a podcast on Wednesday: I spoke the words I f****** spoke.
With her reaction to the monarch’s dying hours, Uju Anya, a Nigerian-American professor of linguistics at Carnegie Mellon University, incited worldwide outrage.
Among those who criticised her remark was Jeff Bezos, who said: “This is someone who is supposed to be trying to make the world a better place? In my opinion, no. Wow.’
Anya, 46, said on Wednesday that she didn’t regret posting her message, which Twitter has since deleted, on the podcast This Week In White Supremacy.
Anya tweeted in response to the uproar: “If anyone expects me to express anything other than disdain for the monarch who oversaw a government that supported 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.”
On Wednesday, she remarked on the show, “In other words, I said what I f****** said.”
Anya had no love for the queen, who passed away last week at the age of 96, because of what her family had gone through in Nigeria.
A civil war broke out in the country’s east in 1967, seven years after Nigeria gained independence from the British Empire and 15 years after the young queen ascended to the throne.
Igbo separatists in Nigeria sought independence, but the Nigerian government violently suppressed them with the help of the British government, which provided firearms.
In the two-year war, over a million people perished, many of them from famine.
Anya accused the monarchy.
I had an emotional response. And a meltdown,” she said to the podcast hosts.
“This news triggered me.”
For me, it delved deeply into suffering and trauma. due of my family’s history under this monarch’s reign.
Anya, who identified herself as a “left-leaning, unapologetic” provocateur used to heated discussion, said that her tweet was “not planned, very spontaneous,” and “very authentic.”
I’ve heard that the murderous empire’s supreme ruler is finally passing away. She wished her anguish would be unbearable in a tweet to her roughly 70,000 followers.
The tweet’s popularity startled her, but she insisted that its purpose was to inform people.
“I like instructing. I am a teacher at my core, she said.
And I provide proof and arguments in support of the statements I make.
Some opinion writers also praised the queen’s passing, with one pledging to dance on her grave and another calling her 70-year rule “devastating.”
Provocateurs began making fun of the global outpouring of sadness only hours after the 96-year-old monarch passed away, and they did it in some of the most prestigious American magazines.
Tirhakah Love, a senior newsletter writer for New York Magazine, was in charge of mocking her rule.
He said in his Thursday night message that “that coloniser has been sucking up the Earth’s resources for 96 years.”
You can’t be a physical oppressor and expect your victims to not celebrate your passing, he continued.
When she passed away, Love, who was appointed in December and was praised by magazine editors for being “innovative and restless” and “funny and unexpected,” said he was filled with pleasure.
I’m now expected to remain silent or, even better, express genuine sorrow for what was once a lifeless Glad ForceFlex garbage bag. He wrote, “Please, no.
“I just want to remind you that most people will be celebrating today in the rest of the world, and I mean the real globe.
“We all have our ways of grieving friends; mine happens to be performing the electric slide on a colonizer’s grave,” one person said.
Love tweeted: “haha make sure yall read dinner party” since he knew his opinions on the newsletter would be controversial.
The Texan responded when someone expressed feigned horror: “lmaoo whatchu meaannn?” I’ll continue to be polite and kind as always.
Maya Jasanoff, a history professor at Harvard University who specialises in the history of Britain and the British Empire, said in The New York Times that it was incorrect to “romanticize” her rule.
She added, “The queen contributed to the concealment of a terrible history of decolonization, whose dimensions and legacies have yet to be completely recognized.”
Repression is highlighted in Malaya, Kenya, Yemen, Cyprus, and Ireland by Jasanoff.
She remarked, “We may never find out what the queen knew or didn’t know about the atrocities perpetrated in her name.”
“Those who predicted a second Elizabethan period assumed Elizabeth II would uphold British glory; unfortunately, it was the era of the empire’s downfall,” says one author.
On her Twitter account, Jemele Hill, a writer for The Atlantic, added to the conversation by claiming that journalists had a responsibility to document what she termed the “devastating” effects of Elizabeth’s rule.
Journalists are entrusted with placing legacies into their proper historical perspective, therefore Hill said that it is completely legitimate to look at the queen and her part in the disastrous effects of ongoing colonialism.
Another criticism of the tweet was left in the comment area, with one person writing, “Lol ain’t no one going to say a thing tho.”
When might be a good moment to discuss colonisation under the queen, said another journalist, Eugene Scott of The Washington Post.
For those who believe that it is inappropriate to discuss colonialism’s detrimental effects right now, the real issue is: When is it proper to do so? He composed.
A video of several guys tap dancing in front of Buckingham Palace to the tune of Another One Bites the Dust was tweeted by Imani Gandy, a legal expert at Rewire News.
She added, “The Irish are already on it hahaha” when the queen passed away.