Priyamvada Gopal is a Professor in the Faculty of English at the University of Cambridge, where she is a Fellow of Churchill College. Her main teaching and research interests are in colonial and postcolonial literature and theory, gender and feminism, Marxism and critical race studies.

An online petition has been launched to remove her because she tweeted that “white lives don’t matter” and called to “abolish whiteness”. Not only did the university not remove her, but they gave Gopal a promotion.

This should come as no surprise when we take into account several sinister factors that have coalesced into the phenomenon that is Priyamvada Gopal. Born into a privileged background, she attended an international high school in Vienna, where her father served as a diplomat in the mid-1980s. Gopal received a BA from the University of Delhi in 1989 and an MA from Jawaharlal Nehru University in 1991. After finishing her studies in India, she moved to the United States, where she taught at different institutions and completed her PhD in colonial and postcolonial literature at Cornell University in 2000.