Thousands sign letter supporting CMU professor who wished 'excruciating' death on Queen Elizabeth II

More than 3,000 people have signed a letter rallying around Uju Anya, a Carnegie Mellon University professor whose tweet last week wished Queen Elizabeth II an excruciating death and sparked outcry from some and support from others.

The signatures — just over 3,800 as of 5:30 p.m. Monday — came from students, academics and others across from Pittsburgh to Venezuela.

The post, which Twitter has since removed, came alongside news that the queen was in failing health and her family had gathered by her side. The Royal Family had not yet announced the 96-year-old monarch’s death at the time.

“I heard the chief monarch of a thieving raping genocidal empire is finally dying,” the initial tweet read. “May her pain be excruciating.”

The tweet gained attention after Amazon founder Jeff Bezos took note of it on the platform, taking aim at Anya’s position as a professor: “This is someone supposedly working to make the world better? I don’t think so. Wow.”

"While within public discourse, the term “colonizer” can appear to be an abstract term that people have only read about in history books, Dr. Anya experienced the reverberations of colonial white supremacy first hand." https://t.co/7ppF8ZaUby

— Society for Cultural Anthropology (@culanth) September 10, 2022

“Bezos did not condemn the words and sentiment of Dr. Anya’s tweet, which would’ve been his right to free speech,” the letter read in part. “Instead, he vilified her by suggesting that her pedagogical, activist, and scholarly contributions are ‘supposedly’ not ‘working to make the world better.’”

“We beg to differ,” the letter continued, “as would the many students with improved experiences in world language education and the increasing number of African American students entering applied linguistics because they now see themselves within historically white spaces precisely because of the groundwork laid by Dr. Anya.”

Anya, a professor in CMU’s Department of Modern Languages, focuses the language-learning experience of Black students. Her biography notes that she has won numerous awards during her time at other universities, including Penn State.

Carnegie Mellon condemned Anya’s sentiment as “offensive and objectionable” but noted that it had been posted to her personal social media account and “free expression is core to the mission of higher education.”

“However,” said spokesman Peter Kerwin, “the views she shared absolutely do not represent the values of the institution, nor the standards of discourse we seek to foster.”

Anya, of Nigerian-Trinidadian descent, defended her views, noting that the colonialism of decades’ past deeply affected her family.

“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,” she wrote.

The letter of support expounds on Anya’s roots, noting that her parents and siblings barely survived genocide in Nigeria. Other family members, according to the letter, were killed.

“While within public discourse, the term ‘colonizer’ can appear to be an abstract term that people have only read about in history books, Dr. Anya experienced the reverberations of colonial white supremacy first hand,” according to the letter. “Thus, Queen Elizabeth II was not figuratively but literally her colonizer.

It continued: “As a Black woman who was born in Nigeria, whose family has been directly harmed by the insidious impacts of British imperialism, genocide, and white supremacy, Dr. Anya expressed her pain on her personal Twitter account.”

On Monday evening, Anya tweeted her appreciation for the support that has been shown for her, saying “All of you showed me I have people in my life, in my new city of Pittsburgh, in my university, in this country, and around the world. I am deeply grateful to you, my people, for holding me in strength and community.”

Hi all, I'm back.
I'd like to say a heartfelt THANK YOU to my loving partner Dr. Sirry Alang @ProfAlang and everyone who rallied for me here and elsewhere. Thanks for tweeting, talking, writing/signing support letters, etc. You showed me something very important: I have people.

— Uju Anya (@UjuAnya) September 12, 2022