The professor who celebrated the death of former first lady Barbara Bush is back in the news.
Randa Jarrar, who teaches at Fresno State University, thinks all white editors in the United States ought to be fired.
Oddly enough, the editor who inspired this insight is a leftist who works at a leftist publication that has been nothing if not hospitable to the ideological musings of leftist professors such as Randa Jarrar.
Poetry Editor Insulted People Of Color
Campus Reform, which tracks the activities and commentary of the liberal-left professariat, somehow had access to Jarrar’s Twitter account, which she closed after the uproar about her denunciation of First Lady Bush.
Jarrar’s outrage appears to have been sparked by a recent controversy about a poem published in The Nation that has been called insensitive to minorities and the disabled community.
The poem, “How-To” by Anders Carlson-Wee, includes the lines “Don’t say homeless, they know / you is” and “If you’re crippled don’t / flaunt it. Let em think they’re good enough / Christians to notice.”
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Apparently, this poem incited an ideological seizure in Jarrar.
Taking to Twitter, she flailed the poetry editor of The Nation, Stephanie Burt, claiming that she “erases and violently silences [people of color].”
“Stephanie has said some hurtful s*** about George W Bush and has hurt Arab American poets in my community,” Jarrar tweeted. “I ask that she resign.”
Amusingly, The Nation’s poetry editors actually apologized, but at any rate Jarrar wasn’t finished. Having unbosomed herself of her opinion about The Nation, she offered this:
At some point, all of us in the literary community must DEMAND that white editors resign. It’s time to STEP DOWN and hand over the positions of power. We don’t have to wait for them to f**k up. The fact that they hold these positions is f**k up enough.
How many white editors in America have resigned after this entirely reasonable demand we are not given to know.
Attack On Bush
Billed in one profile as a “a queer, Muslim, Palestinian-American and proud fat femme [who] lives the complexities of intersectionality,” Jarrar is nothing if not unafraid of timid administrators at Fresno State will send her packing. That’s because the last time she landed in the news, she went unpunished after hurling her indecent deprecation of Mrs. Bush:
Barbara Bush was a generous and smart and amazing racist who, along with her husband, raised a war criminal. F*** outta here with your nice words.
— Randa Jarrar (@randajarrar) April 18, 2018
PSA: either you are against these pieces of s*** and their genocidal ways or you’re part of the problem. that’s actually how simple this is. I’m happy the witch is dead. can’t wait for the rest of her family to fall to their demise the way 1.5 million iraqis have. Byyyeeeeeeee.
Jarrar then told another Twitter user she could write or say anything she wanted without fear of losing her “$100,000” a year professorship because she is tenured:
sweetie i work as a tenured professor. I make 100K a year doing that. i will never be fired. i will always have people wanting to hear what i have to say. even you are one of them!
Campus Reform found out that Jarra earned only $85,104, and university president Joseph Castro told the Fresno Bee that, contrary to what Jarrar thinks, she does not have carte blanche to say anything she wants.
“A professor with tenure does not have blanket protection to say and do what they wish,” he said. “We are all held accountable for our actions.”
That raised the obvious question of when Castro would hold Jarrar accountable for her actions.
Castro apologized for Jarrar’s unhinged Twitter rant, noting that the school extends its “deepest condolences” to the Bush family. Those “views and commentary are obviously contrary to the core values of our University, which include respect and empathy for individuals with divergent points of view, and a sincere commitment to mutual understanding and progress.”
And on a radio program, he said, “I condemn the tone, substance and timing of Dr. Jarrar’s comments on Twitter, last night.” He added: “I want that to be unambiguous. And how do I feel? I was shocked, upset, appalled just like everybody else.”
Not appalled enough, apparently, to cashier someone who thinks whites should be fired because they are white.
Photo: KLH49/E+/Getty Images
