In the hours after Barbara Bush died Tuesday, even those who didn’t share the former first lady’s political views expressed their condolences and recounted warm memories of the Bush family matriarch.
Former president Bill Clinton, the man who once campaigned against her husband, called her “a remarkable woman” with “grit grace, brains beauty.” Another former president, Barack Obama, said she had “humility and decency that reflects the very best of the American spirit.”
But a creative writing professor at California State University at Fresno had a message for those offering up fond remembrances:
“Barbara Bush was a generous and smart and amazing racist who, along with her husband, raised a war criminal,” Randa Jarrar wrote on Twitter on Tuesday evening, according to the Fresno Bee.
Jarrar’s words — and others that she used as she argued with critics for hours during an overnight tweetstorm — sparked a backlash on social media that would soon prompt the university to distance itself from her remarks.
More than 2,000 people had replied to her before she made her Twitter account private, the Bee reported. Some were upset at what they viewed as Jarrar’s incivility about a woman widely regarded as genteel. For others, the sin was more basic: She had spoken ill of the dead.
Jarrar pointed to the comments as an example of “what it’s like to be an Arab American Muslim American woman with some clout online expressing an opinion.”
“Look at the racists going crazy in my mentions right now,” she tweeted.
The writer taunted those attacking her, sharing a contact number that was actually that of Arizona State University’s suicide hotline, and said she was a tenured professor who makes $100,000 a year.
“I will never be fired,” she tweeted.
Many tagged Fresno State and the institution’s president, Joseph Castro, demanding that the professor be fired. Jarrar laughed at them.
“LOL let me help you. You should tag my president @JosephlCastro. What I love about being an American professor is my right to free speech, and what I love about Fresno State is that I always feel protected and at home here,” Jarrar wrote. “GO BULLDOGS!”
On Wednesday, Castro told the Bee that Jarrar’s comments were “beyond free speech. This was disrespectful.”
“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.”
Jarrar did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
[A public university refused to pay for an antiabortion speaker. Now students are suing.]
People found other ways to strike back at her. The rating on the Amazon.com page for Jarrar’s book took a precipitous drop after it received a slew of bad reviews in the wake of her comments. “Prosaic, poorly-written, poor grammar, incoherent,” one reviewer said. “Will make for expensive toilet paper.”
According to the Los Angeles Times, the author, who is in her late 30s, was born in the United States to Palestinian and Egyptian parents and has lived in the Persian Gulf and Cairo and on the East Coast.
She graduated from Sarah Lawrence College with a degree in creative writing before earning a postgraduate degree in Middle Eastern studies from the University of Texas at Austin and a master’s of fine arts from the University of Michigan, according to the Bee.
Her books include “A Map of Home” and her debut collection of short stories, “Him, Me, Muhammad Ali,” about mostly female characters who are “all of Middle Eastern descent and all deviate from the usual perceptions many Americans have about Arab women,” according to the Times.
The last review of Jarrar on RateMyProfessors.com was on December 2017, where the commenter said it was an “amazing class” and the professor was “super caring and funny, always encouraging us to write more.”
And amid the barrage of online criticism, some defended Jarrar.
Fresno State originally responded to the controversy Tuesday evening, tweeting a statement by Castro that said Jarrar’s words are “obviously contrary to the core values of our University” and they “were made as a private citizen.”
In a Wednesday morning news conference, Provost Lynnette Zelezny said the university had put in place “additional security,” a common action “when we feel that there’s a spotlight on us.”
As the provost spoke, the points Jarrar had made about Barbara Bush were still reverberating across the Internet. She brought up, for example, Bush’s statements about the mostly black evacuees taking refuge in Houston’s Astrodome during Hurricane Katrina.
Bush made statements that many viewed as insensitive after her son George W. Bush’s administration was criticized for its slow response to Katrina in 2005, according to The Washington Post’s Lois Romano. Barbara Bush told the public radio program “Marketplace” that the evacuees who had fled their homes and were being sheltered in Houston’s Astrodome “were underprivileged anyway, so this is working very well for them.”
On Wednesday, Castro did not say how the university would handle Jarrar’s case, according to the Bee.
Jarrar is on leave of absence this semester and is not teaching any courses on campus this semester, Patti Waid, director of university communications, told Visalia Times Delta on Wednesday.
The contact page of Jarrar’s website said, “I do not read or respond to messages about Barbara Bush,” next to a heart emoji.
But Jarrar did return to Twitter on Wednesday, according to a screenshot by the Bee.
“I’m still fabulous, thanks for checking in. Love to all of you who have sent support,” she tweeted.
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