Kamala GIF Tiff Sparks Mandatory ‘Anti-Racism’ Training at Cornell
30th April 2021
A fight that began with a GIF of Kamala Harris sipping tea has left two minority Cornell University educators unemployed, but the legacy of their Twitter confrontation will live on as the Ivy League university’s tech campus mandated “anti-racism” training for all students.
Former visiting lecturer J. Khadijah Abdurahman accused Cornell associate professor Tapan Parikh of firing her “for calling out South Asian anti-Blackness with a GIF and speaking out against ethnic cleansing in the Tigray region of Ethiopia” in a March Medium post. Abdurahman reupped the GIF in question—a meme of the vice president sipping tea, intended to mock an endorsement of a syllabus for one of Parikh’s courses that included critical race theory. Parikh sent angry private messages to her about the professional slight and terminated her employment at Cornell Tech, the university’s New York City-based tech campus, according to Abdurahman’s post.