Thousands Support PA Professor Who Wished Queen Elizabeth An 'Excruciating' Death

PENNSYLVANIA — A Pennsylvania professor whose tweets about Queen Elizabeth's death drew attention to the human rights abuses committed by monarchal colonialism is seeing a massive wave of support from academic communities around the world.

Supporters of Uyu Anya, a Nigerian applied linguistics professor and Ph.D at Carnegie Mellon whose research focuses on race and social identity, argue that she was putting media and public treatment of what the monarchy represents into an important socio-political and historical context.

“I heard the chief monarch of a thieving and raping genocidal empire is finally dying," Anya wrote last Thursday in a tweet that was quickly removed by Twitter and which led to a suspension of her account. "May her pain be excruciating."

RELATED: Britain's Queen Elizabeth II Dies: Remembering Her Influence On PA

Carnegie Mellon issued a statement that afternoon, noting that they "do not condone the offensive and objectionable messages" in Anya's tweets. "Free expression is core to the mission of higher education," they added. "However, the views she shared absolutely do not represent the values of the institution."

Her comments sparked a group of six professors to write a lengthy letter, which has been cosigned by more than 3,400 other professors, teachers, graduate students, researchers, and other academics from around the world. Their impassioned letter was not just a defense of Anya's tweets, but a condemnation of how the west handles monarchy and reacts to expressions of generational trauma from people of color.

"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," the letter reads. "Not only did Queen Elizabeth II sit on a throne of Indigenous and Black blood, embedded in the overall legacy of the British monarchy, her actual government presided over and directly facilitated the genocide that Dr. Anya’s parents and siblings barely survived."

Long before her comments on Queen Elizabeth drew both widespread support and outrage, Anya was a notable public figure. Her Twitter account features more than 186,000 followers and she's received plaudits for her academic work, including her award-winning "Racialized Identities in Second Language Language: Speaking Blackness in Brazil" in 2019.

She's attempted to use her recent fame to address LGBTQ rights in her native Nigeria. While her comments have sparked thousands of social media messages from her countrymen and women in support, she says she sees a vein of lingering discrimination.

"All this love you send to me, I receive and return it," she wrote. "As you’re here saying me being gay doesn’t matter, or you won’t disown me, please, I beg you, can you find the same grace for the LGBTQ people in your lives? Can you please love us like we love you?"

Anya has not been fired or further censured, and she has publicly said since that she does not believe her job is in jeopardy.