A Drexel University professor is facing backlash for a racially-charged social media message he says was intended to spread awareness.
According to The Huffington Post, Politics and History teacher George Ciccariello says he was intending to highlight the ridiculous white supremacists claims that minorities are out to eliminate the white race when he sent out the controversial tweet that read: “All I want for Christmas is white genocide.”
Professor Ciccariello later followed the original tweet, which he sent on Christmas Eve, with a second tweet on Christmas Day that read: “To clarify, when the whites were massacred during the Haitian revolution, that was a good thing indeed.”
After his messages were met with heavy criticism from angered followers who accused him of “reverse racism,” the professor spoke out to further elaborate on what led him to post the messages and offer quick lesson on the fabricated history of the ‘white genocide’ term.
“On Christmas Eve, I sent a satirical tweet about an imaginary concept, ‘white genocide,'” he wrote in an email to the Philadelphia Inquirer. “For those who haven’t bothered to do their research, ‘white genocide’ is an idea invented by white supremacists and used to denounce everything from interracial relationships to multicultural policies.”
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The professor also revealed that he had been the target of recent harassment by white supremacists, which also played a role in him sending out the messages. In the end, he says he was proud to be able to mock the idea of a phrase invented by racists like white supremacists in an attempt to draw attention away from the volatile nature of their very existence.
“It is a figment of the racist imagination,”he added. “It should be mocked and I’m glad to have mocked it.”
Ciccariello restricted public access to his Twitter account shortly after the tweets went viral, saying he’d begun receiving death threats from people on social media amid the backlash.
Drexel administrators later tweeted that they’d called a meeting with the professor to discuss the incident following the uproar.