What Is White Genocide? Race War Debated After Drexler Professor Tweets, 'All I Want For Christmas Is White Genocide'

Drexler University has condemned one of its professors for tweeting on Christmas Eve, "all I want for Christmas is white genocide." The term "white genocide" was trending on Twitter Monday, casting a new spotlight on the nation's white supremacy debate.

Drexel University in Philadelphia issued a statement on Christmas Day distancing itself from the tweet after it went viral. Many conservative websites also condemned the message from George Ciccariello-Maher, an associate professor of politics and global studies at Drexel, Inside Higher Ed reported Monday.

It's unclear if he was calling for the mass killing of whites. Ciccariello-Maher is known as a radical critic of U.S. and global politics and has written about white genocide as an imagined threat concocted by white nationalists. Ciccariello-Maher made his Twitter feed private after writing the Christmas wish.

Ciccariello-Maher went on to tweet Sunday: "To clarify: when the whites were massacre during the Haitian revolution, that was a good thing indeed." Some conservatives called for his immediate dismissal.

"Drexel became aware today of Associate Professor George Ciccariello-Maher's inflammatory tweet, which was posted on his personal Twitter account on Dec. 24, 2016," Drexel said in a statement. "While the university recognizes the right of its faculty to freely express their thoughts and opinions in public debate, Professor Ciccariello-Maher's comments are utterly reprehensible, deeply disturbing, and do not in any way reflect the values of the university. The university is taking this situation very seriously. We contacted Ciccariello-Maher today to arrange a meeting to discuss this matter in detail."

White nationalists have long warned about a war on white America and "White Genocide" has become somewhat of a code word indicating concern about non-white immigration and high fertility rates for non-white women. The fear is that whites will lose their majority status in the U.S. and European nations in the coming decades.

A group called the White Genocide Project, which has paid for billboards in Alabama that read “Anti-racist is a code word for anti-White,” claims on its website that "Diversity is a code word for White genocide." "'Diverse' simply means a place without any White people in it. So every time they talk about a 'lack of diversity,' they have said what their object is: a place that becomes less and less White – which is genocide," the site reads.

President-elect Donald Trump has been linked to white nationalism, with the Ku Klux Klan and other groups citing his victory as an opportunity to fight for white rights. Trump has said his supporters are not racist.

Ciccariello-Maher's bio page reads: "His most recent book, We Created Chávez: A People's History of the Venezuelan Revolution (Duke University Press, 2013), examines social movements and revolutionary groups active before and during the era of late Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez. Ciccariello-Maher 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."