Apparently there is a bridge too far, and Bahar Mustafa may have finally crossed it. A student at Goldsmiths, University of London, where she also works as a welfare and diversity officer, Mustafa first made headlines back in April when she announced that a diversity rally was off-limits to anyone who was white and/or male. She was in the news again last week after reacting to accusations that she’s a racist by insisting it is “impossible for women of color and minority genders” to be “racist or sexist.”
This time her views may cost her her job. Messages she has tweeted that include the hashtag #killallwhitemen have prompted other students at Goldsmiths to launch a petition, posted on the university’s Student Union website, that seeks to have her removed from her post via a vote of no confidence.
A second petition at Change.org goes a step further, demanding that London police arrest Mustafa for “hate speech and calls for murder.” The framers of the petition argue that Mustafa’s statements violate Britain’s Racial Hatred Act, noting further the irony of a “so called ‘Diversity Officer’ whom [sic] calls for the murder of a race due to their [sic] skin colour and gender.” So far, the petition has garnered close to 13,000 signatures.
Mustafa has argued that her tweets (which have since been scrubbed from her Twitter account) were intended as an “in-joke” among “people in the queer feminist community,” telling the Independent:
It’s a way of reclaiming the power from the trauma many of us experience as queers, women, people of colour, who are on the receiving end of racism, misogyny and homophobia daily.
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