USA Today’s “race and inclusion” editor was fired last week after using her professional Twitter account to make the – ultimately wrong – assumption that the man who killed 10 people at a Boulder, Colorado, grocery store was white.
Hemal Jhaveri wrote in a Twitter exchange with Deadspin senior editor Julie DiCaro that “it’s always an angry white man” who commits mass shootings. Jhaveri said this in response to DiCaro’s tweet saying, “Extremely tired of people’s lives depending on whether a white man with an AR-15 is having a good day or not.”
As The Daily Wire reported, however, the shooter was not white, but a Muslim who was born in Syria but spent most of his life in the United States.
As The Federalist’s Emily Jashinsky explained, Jhaveri’s error was particularly large given her position.
“Of course, that amounts to the “race and inclusion” editor of a major purportedly objective publication getting basic facts about race incorrect on a professional platform in the wake of a mass tragedy. She didn’t get facts about the budget wrong as a smalltime fashion blogger. She got one major fact directly related to her job wrong on a big story,” Jashinsky wrote.
Firing Jhaveri may have been extreme, but her reaction to getting fired was even worse. In a Medium post, Jhaveri ripped her former employer and downplayed her transgression by alleging “white supremacy” was rampant at USA Today.
“White USA TODAY reporters have been able to minimize racialized people in print, our white Editor-In-Chief was thoughtless about black face, and a senior politics editor (also white) showed disregard for journalistic ethics by hosting a tax payer funded reception for Trump appointees. All kept their jobs,” Jhaveri wrote.
“Sending one wrong tweet that ended up in the hands of Sean Hannity on Fox News though, was enough for this publication to turn tail,” she added. “So many newsrooms claim to value diverse voices, yet when it comes to backing them up, or looking deeper into how white supremacy permeates their own newsrooms, they quickly retreat.”
To further burn the bridge, Jhaveri listed numerous grievances she claimed to have experienced during the eight years she worked for USA Today, including allegedly being asked to edit articles on young black golfers so as not to “alienate white audiences.”
Jhaveri went on to claim that insisting racism is everywhere is treated as a “bias” when, in her mind, it is a fact. As Jashinsky wrote:
This sentiment is representative of the cultural left’s insistence that everything outside its own radical worldview is necessarily bigoted and necessarily wrong. Thus, to Jhaveri, it isn’t bias, it’s as a clear a moral position as opposing murder. That’s also why people like Jhaveri operate on much broader definitions of bigotry and “white supremacy” than the general public. In their rigid progressive-or-bigot binary formulation, all disagreement embodies and perpetuates bigotry and must have no voice.
Fish don’t know they’re wet and media leftists don’t know they’re biased. They swim in the waters of ideological consensus to the point where they don’t realize certain aspects of their worldview represent ideological bias. Jhaveri’s contention in that Medium post is Exhibit A.