Black Professor Saida Grundy Criticized for Tweets on White Masculinity

Right Wing Twitter is loudly outraging itself today over the tweets of Dr. Saida Grundy, a new African American Studies professor at Boston University who dared to imply that white people were responsible for slavery and called “white college age males” a “problem population.”

A right-leaning college blog called SoCawlege, run by a guy named Nick Pappas, seems to have been the first place to get angry about Grundy’s tweets, pointing out ones where she said things like, “White people, slavery is a *YALL* thing,” and calling her “a big problem” for BU. Pappas also declared she was unfit to teach white men: “If you are going to work at Boston University you have to teach college aged white males eventually no? You probably already have/are working with them. To us, this seems like you are unqualified to grade their work as you clearly demonstrate some kind of special bias against them.”

When it comes to campus rape, of course, white men are a “problem population,” making up more than 60 percent of offenders according to the Department of Justice. And pinning slave ownership in the United States on white people is… reasonable? Isn’t it? Are we really pretending that one’s not ours? C’mon.

Nonetheless, this has caught on in all the usual places, with FOX and the Washington Times wringing their tiny little hands. The reaction on Twitter has been so charming that Grundy has elected to make her Twitter account private:

A spokesperson for Boston University told Fox that they didn’t agree with her tweets—“The University does not condone racism or bigotry in any form and we are deeply saddened when anyone makes such offensive statements”—but pointed out that she has a right to express her opinions on her personal Twitter account.

That’s unlikely to quell the tide of hurt feelings; there is, inevitably, a petition calling for Grundy’s firing: “Her radical idealism has created counter productive learning environment at Boston University and has tarnished the namesake of Boston University.” Name. You mean name.

Image via wilsx4/Flickr

Public PGP key
PGP fingerprint: 67B5 5767 9D6F 652E 8EFD 76F5 3CF0 DAF2 79E5 1FB6