[Summation: professor endorses "white genocide", says it's a joke and that white genocide is a figment of racist imagination, despite previously citing an actual literal instance of white genocide and saying it was a good thing]

A Drexel professor whose tweets about white supremacy sparked an uproar on social media says his words were misinterpreted satire.

"All I Want for Christmas is White Genocide," associate professor of politics and global studies George Ciccariello-Maher wrote on Christmas Eve.

He then wrote on Sunday: "To clarify: when the whites were massacred during the Haitian revolution, that was a good thing indeed."

Not long thereafter, Ciccariello-Maher's tweets were picked up by the Daily Caller, Breitbart and other conservative news sites. His tweets are not public, or at least weren't as of Monday morning. It is public, though, that he has over 10,000 followers and has tweeted over 16,000 times.

Ciccariello-Maher teaches in Drexel's Department of History and Politics. His bio on Drexel's website says he is "an expert and frequent media commentator on social movements, particularly in Latin America" who also "teaches, researches and writes about race, racism, prisons and policing in the U.S. and internationally, including how race is associated with suspicion and guilt."

[...]

Reached on Monday by The Inquirer, Ciccariello-Maher offered a reaction to the reaction.

"On Christmas Eve, I sent a satirical tweet about an imaginary concept, 'white genocide,'" he said in an e-mail. 'For those who haven't bothered to do their research, 'white genocide' is an idea invented by white supremacists and used to denounce everything from interracial relationships to multicultural policies (and most recently, against a tweet by State Farm Insurance). It is a figment of the racist imagination, it should be mocked, and I'm glad to have mocked it."