Email Subject Header: “URGENT: Request to Rescind 2021 Fulbright Fellowship Offer to Jubilee Witte”

Forward to:

Greetings Dr. Omolola,

I am writing to demand that you rescind your Fall 2021 offer from American University (AU), Fulbright Scholar recipient Jubilee Witte. Jubilee was awarded an 8-week cultural immersion fellowship to travel to Nigeria and study the Yoruba tribe. However, several instances of Jubilee’s racist, sexist, and overall abhorrent behavior toward Black women of color on campus have been shared online. Various black female students have publicly posted their accounts of his harassment. These instances include the following:

  • The sexual assault and emotional abuse of a former non-binary American University student who has stated that Jubilee fetishized both they and their friends who were all women of color.  
  • Joking about purposefully infecting white women with STD’s through condomless sex, in order to eliminate the white race and repopulate the world with the “mixed-babies” he’d presumably create with black women.
  • Multiple black women have accused Jubilee of relentlessly harassing them to go back to their countries of origin because their blackness didn’t give them the right to claim America as their home—despite them being born in the United States.
  • Diminishing the lived-experiences of discrimination against black women by patronizingly explaining how he would be the one to personally “free” black people from oppression.
  • Telling black women of color that they were “not black enough” to understand the lived discrimination they face.
  • Inciting racial violence via his, now-private, personal Twitter and Instagram accounts (@FtpRevolution)  
  • Dismissing the experiences of a Black woman and becoming defensive when she corrected him about his incorrect statement about Nigerian tribes. Several people have also stated, and have witnessed him using Blackness “as an alternative culture that can be used to spice up his white life.”

Jubilee does not deserve access to the rich cultural and linguistic history that is a part of Nigeria. This is a man who has continuously demonstrated that he thinks himself better than those whom he claims to want to study from, engage with, and help. He is no different from the colonizers whose lies about their true intentions cost Africa and the rest of the world generations of autonomy over their own truth. Our world is at the brink of a new age in which black people of color (BlPOC) are finally able to claim and celebrate their own narratives. Given this, it is imperative that BlPOC around the world be protected against all attacks, overt and covert. This is especially true when it comes to populations that have already suffered at the hands of white supremacy.

So many Nigerian women already fight tirelessly to protect themselves against abusers and rapists in their own country. To allow another known predator to infiltrate their space under the guise of allyship and further their victimization would be, both, an unethical and reprehensible mismanagement of resources.

Jubilee Witte has used his African American and African Diaspora studies at AU to cover his racist remarks and actions and pose as a “woke revolutionary”—all while continuously harassing and victimizing women and non-binary individuals in the AU student body. In constantly centering himself as an authority in conversations about race—specifically Blackness—and sexually and emotionally abusing innocent individuals, Jubilee perpetuates the same physical and verbal violence that Black people have endured for years. A person with Jubilee’s track record as a white supremacist should not be allowed to go anywhere near Africa, let alone be enabled through a Fulbright sponsorship.

In the interest of justice for members of the American University student body, of protecting members of the Yoruba tribe of Nigeria, and in alignment with your own promise to protect black individuals across the globe from racism, we urge you to follow suit and revoke Jubilee Witte’s fellowship.

Sincere Regards,

[YOUR NAME]

A member of the American University student community