The “woke” Carnegie Mellon University professor, who wished Queen Elizabeth II an “excruciating” death in the hours before her passing, has doubled down on her comments.
Uju Anya, a Nigerian-American professor of linguistics at the Pennsylvania college, celebrated on social media as reports emerged that the Queen was in her final hours.
“I heard the chief monarch of a thieving, raping genocidal empire is finally dying,” she wrote in a tweet to her approximately 70,000 Twitter followers.
“May her pain be excruciating.”
Anya’s comments provoked a widespread backlash.
Among those to respond was Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.
“This is someone supposedly working to make the world better?” Bezos said of her comments.
“I don’t think so. Wow.”
As Slay News reported, Anya responded to Bezos by claiming that his comments “incited violence” against her.
In response to the backlash, Anya tweeted: “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.”
On Wednesday, Anya told the podcast “This Week In White Supremacy” that she had no regrets about her tweet, which has been removed by Twitter.
She told the podcast: “In other words, I said what I f**king said.”
Anya’s hatred for the Queen, who died last week aged 96, stems from her family’s experience in Nigeria.
In 1967 – seven years after Nigeria became independent of the British Empire, and 15 years after the young queen took the throne – civil war broke out in the east of the country.
Biafra separatists wanted independence for Nigeria’s Igbo people, but they were strongly repressed by the Nigerian government.
More than a million people died in the two-year conflict – many of them from starvation.
Anya blames the Queen.
“I had an emotional reaction,” she told the podcast hosts.
“And an emotional outburst.”
“I was triggered by this news.
“It went deep into pain and trauma for me.
“Due to my family experience with the rule of this monarch.”
Anya, who describes herself as an “unapologetic, Left-leaning” provocateur used to contentious debate, said her tweet was “not planned, very spontaneous” and “extremely real.”
She said she was surprised by how much attention the tweet received, but said it was designed to “educate” people.
“I like to teach,” she said.
“I am fundamentally a teacher.
“And I bring evidence and support for the claims that I make.”
Anya has yet to provide any evidence to support the claims she has made.
