Warning: this article contains spoilers from the newly released film, “Am I Racist?”
The Arizona State University (ASU) graduate who gained notoriety for her viral confrontation of two white students, Sarra Tekola, was featured in the latest mockumentary film from Daily Wire, “Am I Racist?”
Tekola accosted two white male students in September 2021 for studying in a room established around that time as a multicultural center under a campaign she helped to lead. At the time of the incident, per our past reporting, the room had not yet been established officially as a multicultural center and no signage existed to designate the room as such.
Though the Arizona Board of Regents determined that Tekola’s actions violated the Code of Conduct — only finding guilt of interfering with university activities, but not harassment — ASU awarded her a doctorate in sustainability eight months later in May of 2022. Tekola runs her own consulting firm presently, and now goes by “they/he” pronouns as “Yeshaq Sarra Tekola.”
Daily Wire host Matt Walsh provided commentary of Tekola’s actions at the time and subsequently provided coverage on developments following the incident.
Now, nearly three years to the day of that viral incident, Walsh premiered a mockumentary, “Am I Racist?” in which he interviews Tekola.
However, Walsh didn’t present himself to Tekola under his true identity. Walsh also didn’t interview Tekola about the 2021 incident. Rather, Walsh presented himself as a diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) advocate and interviewed Tekola about her beliefs on racism.
At no point in the portions of the interview included in the movie did Tekola discern Walsh’s true identity.
During her interview, Tekola told Walsh that she believed that all white people were racist.
Tekola also said she subscribed to a theory that white individuals don’t recognize their racism because they divide themselves into two selves: a subconscious self which is guilty of being racist, and the conscious self which believes it isn’t racist. Tekola told Walsh that it’s the responsibility of white individuals to reconcile the two selves to become aware of their racism.
Tekola also advocated for an end to whiteness altogether.
It is unclear when Walsh filmed this interview with Tekola, though it appears she maintains similar or the same beliefs at present. In an X post earlier this year, Tekola implied that those opposed to illegal immigration based on the surge in violent crimes committed by illegal immigrants were racist.
“Who belongs here [in America]? It’s giving whites only,” wrote Tekola.
Tekola is also the co-founder, co-director, and policy strategist for the Phoenix Metro area’s Black Lives Matter chapter. Tekola also co-founded and co-leads the Phoenix Environmental Justice Coalition. In recent years, Tekola joined the activist organizations Working Families Party Arizona, Chisholm Legacy Project, and Hive Fund.
Prior to enrolling at ASU, Tekola made headlines for her activism: from blocking the construction of a police station in Seattle, Washington to organizing a BLM protest-turned-riot in 2020 that ended with her arrest (for which she raised over $6,000). Tekola was also a Ford Foundation Fellow from 2018 to 2021.
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A Phoenix-area Antifa member, Arizona State University (ASU) graduate, and certified nursing assistant (CNA), Marysa Leyva, made death threats against prominent investigative journalist Andy Ngo, who rehashed details about Leyva’s Antifa involvement and criminal history.
Leyva’s comments were associated with claims that Ngo was behind the shooting that took place at an Antifa meeting in Portland, Oregon earlier this month. Ngo reported that Leyva resides in the Portland area, consistent with the location listed in one of her Twitter account bios.
Disinfo #antifa accounts are spreading false claims about the shooting in Portland. They falsely claim I posted a flyer about their event & that I was involved in the shooting.
Marysa Leyva says it is time for me to die. Felony suspect Alissa Azar says I have blood on my hands. pic.twitter.com/6RrBm1iZ5G
Marysa Leyva, a Phoenix-area militant #antifa member & a traveling nurse who is now in Portland, is calling for me to be killed. She used to run @antifash_m but was so extreme that she was permanently suspended. Now she's evading that ban with a new account calling for violence. pic.twitter.com/s4KAXP9Y18
As Ngo reported, Leyva’s original account, @antifash_m, was suspended for violating Twitter rules. Leyva then made her backup account, @BirdAppFugitive, private after Ngo discovered it; sometime that same week, that secondary account was also suspended. Leyva’s bio describes the account as a slander account for Maricopa County Attorney Allister Adel, who is under investigation by the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors and the State Bar of Arizona for her sobriety and absence at work.
Leyva was one of 15 individuals who received controversial and later dropped street gang charges for her involvement in the August 2020 Black Lives Matter (BLM) protest, which included assisting a criminal street gang, aggravated assault on an officer, rioting, unlawful assembly, resisting arrest, and obstructing a public thoroughfare. As AZ Free News reported, ASU graduate student Sarra Tekola was among those charged. Leyva toldABC15 Arizona that although the felony charges against her were dropped, the ordeal caused her to lose her patient care technician job with Tempe St. Luke’s emergency room.
“We were like, this is just so outrageous,” said Leyva. “How are they ever going to prove this in a court of law? We know Phoenix Police Department is bad, but man, they, like, really were just seeing how much they could get away with.”
Leyva also tweeted that the survival of the five officers who were ambushed by a shooter earlier this month while trying to rescue an infant was a “missed opportunity.”
According to the Arizona State Board of Nursing, Leyva’s nursing license was issued December of last year, and won’t expire until March 2024.
Corinne Murdock is a reporter for AZ Free News. Follow her latest on Twitter, or email tips to corinne@azfreenews.com.
At the end of September, three female students took it upon themselves to defend an unofficially-established multicultural center at the Arizona State University (ASU) Tempe campus by segregating those unwelcome in the longtime common room: white males with what appeared to be differing political beliefs. After two of the students, Sarra Tekola and Mastaani Qureshi, received a punishment of a reflection essay and light warning from the university, the activist pair spoke out in a video posted last week to the Instagram page for their activist group, the Multicultural Solidarity Coalition (MSC). The third student involved, Miriam “Mimi” Araya, wasn’t found guilty of any code of conduct violations.
In their nine-minute video, Tekola and Qureshi claimed that ASU was toxic and a training ground for Nazis and white supremacy. Two ASU professors submitted videos to support the activist pair: English professor Lee Bebout and School of Social Transformation Director Camilla Fojas.
At the time of the incident, ASU claimed to AZ Free News that the three women were engaged in a “disagreement” highlighting “differences of opinion” that were “part of the university experience.” Then, AZ Free News reported last month that the women were being investigated for code of conduct violations.
When the three women recorded their confrontation with two white male students, they demanded that the pair leave because they were white, male, and displaying perceived controversial political messaging: a ‘Police Lives Matter’ sticker, a Bass Pro Shop hat, a Chick-fil-A cup, and a ‘Did Not Vote for Biden’ t-shirt. The three women called the pair “racist” and “Karens,” while accusing them of promoting murderers and white supremacy.
A week prior to their exhortation video against ASU, MSC lamented that the university continued to uphold “respectability politics.” That concept claims that marginalized groups shouldn’t adhere to any cultural or political norms of their oppressors in attempts to reconcile differences.
The following are the complete remarks from Tekola and Qureshi’s video complaint:
Qureshi: On September 23, hateful and racist symbology invaded our Multicultural Center on ASU’s Tempe Campus, and made the center unsafe for BIPOC [Black Indigenous People of Color] students who were trying to study. The two white men, both students, displayed a ‘Police Lives Matter’ sticker, a Bass Pro hat, a Chick-fil-A cup, and an anti-Biden t-shirt.
Tekola: The Police Lives Matter sticker was on one of the white man’s laptop, [sic] laptop which was clearly directed towards a black woman who was leading the black study tables across from him, as the boys chose to sit across from the black study tables. The boys made the space uncomfortable with their nonverbal, aggressive gestures directed towards the black women. The students called for help from ASU but no one came for over 30 minutes, so we were forced to confront these men by ourselves.
Qureshi: After this incident we received thousands of rape, death, and lynching threats on our personal Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and email accounts. It has been more than two months since the incident, and Zarra and I receive these threats every single day.
Tekola: ASU was aware of how we were getting doxxed and suffering psychological and emotional violence by white supremacists across the country, but it still did not protect us. Instead, they launched an investigation against us and we had to mobilize the community to protect ourselves from being kicked out by the institution. ASU’s investigation found us guilty of interfering with university activities.
Qureshi and Tekola: Dear white people: aka, ASU.
Qureshi: You openly discriminated against us on November 16 when you handed down your decision from your racially biased investigation. We are being persecuted for defending our Multicultural Center from racism and sexism. You gave us two punishments: the first one was a warning, and the second one as to write a three page paper on how next time when we talk with white people about race and society we will be civil.
Tekola: This video is a fulfillment of our educational intervention. We are going to give ASU an educational intervention on why telling students of color at ASU to be more civil in the face of white supremacy and neo-Nazism on this campus is actually violent.
Qureshi: ASU is a violent place. Just last week there was an Islamaphobic attack at ASU in which pages from Quran Majeed, the holiest book for Mulsims, were ripped apart and burned for Muslim students to find in the interfaith room. The interfaith room is they only place on campus where Muslim students are told they should pray in. Meanwhile there are multiple small rooms in the multicultural center at ASU Tempe that Muslim women, who are looking for a private place to pray in, are locked out of. We are told the reason that Musllim women cannot use those small spaces to pray in is because it would not be equal.
Tekola: You see, this is the problem: ASU does not understand the difference between equity and equality. And ASU refuses to center the most marginalized. In addition to that hate crime, around October 31 another hate crime happened at ASU Tempe where anti-Semitism flyers littered the campus. These flyers had an ASU registered student club, the College Republicans United, on the flyer. This is the same club that raised money for Kyle Rittenhouse, and these are just the attacks that happened since our own viral incident on September 23. This tells you a little bit about the type of environment, the toxic place that ASU wants us to be civil in.
[clip of Tekola speaking at a protest]: I have come to MLK’s conclusion that I have integrated my people into a burning building. ASU is on fire. For years, ASU has refused to put out a statement condemning white supremacy after being used as a recruiting ground for Nazis, breeding the culture of hate on this campus. They claim it is because of ‘free speech,’ and yet we students of color are being punished for our free speech. I am being punished for being too black, too proud, too loud, and unapologetic. I am being punished for not adopting their respectability politics, but I don’t need respectability politics. I am a foreign fellow appointed by President Crowe himself to the African Advisory Council. I achieved all this while refusing to tone down my blackness to make white people feel more comfortable. Our center has been infiltrated by Trump supporters, and ASU is telling us ‘there’s nothing we can do.’ ASU refuses to protect students of color and the world needs to know how they treat us here on this campus when we push to make it a better place for all.
Bebout (in a clip): Calls for civil dialogue can be weaponized in two critical ways. First, if a white person actively trolls and provokes an encounter but does so in a relatively complicit way — say they enter a space meant to foreground the experiences of people of color, and these folks deploy a rhetoric meant to diminish black and queer lives — as long as the trolling is plausibly deniable to an ideologically white-oriented audience, that any pushback that the white individuals receive may be cast as aggression. The act of instigation itself would be erased, and the instigators will be cast as victims, and the people who seek to defend themselves will be seen as oppressors, uncivil, harassers. Second, because of the way in which civil and rational dialogue is racially coded, when white-aligned institutions call for people of color to be civil to interlocutors that have no interest in earnestly engaging and listening; whether intentionally or not, these institutions are asking people of color and other aggrieved communities to be quieter. They are asking them to be less vociferous in their defense of their personhood. In other words, calls for civility easily become calls for docility: a submission to the way things are, as opposed to a vocal defense of the world as it should be.
Qureshi (in two separate clips from speeches at protests): ASU is angry at me, and wants me to put me back in my place as a brown woman. ASU is punishing us for standing up for our friends and other students of color. ASU is punishing us for telling two white boys that only one room on campus is not going to center them. […] If you all didn’t see it yesterday, the provost of this university, Nancy Gonzales, sent out a statement yesterday in response to the 3,511-plus messages received in support of us. In her statement, Nancy Gonzales tries to sympathize with Zarra, Mimi, and I and assures everyone that ASU is handling this case with cultural awareness. But in her statement, she misspells my first name! How are you going to support me if you even can’t spell my first name correctly on an appropriate statement. This is the level of care ASU has for us: they’re insensitive to Pakistani and Muslim cultures. They want us to turn in a written statement by December 15 explaining how we will be civil and how, and I quote, ‘You might approach such a situation in the future to facilitate a civil dialogue on the purpose of the MC [Multicultural Center] or the topics of race and society are addressed in this confrontation.’ They want me to be civil! They’re calling me a savage! This is what white people did when they came to my country and they colonized us for 270 years!
Fojas (in a clip): […] I think their reaction was justified and was equal to the symbolic violence that these students and their presence and the symbols that were brought into the space represented.
Corinne Murdock is a reporter for AZ Free News. Follow her latest on Twitter, or email tips to corinne@azfreenews.com.
Arizona State University (ASU) student organizations advocating for issues like socialism, antiracism, and social justice are demanding the expulsion of Kyle Rittenhouse, effectively a campaign to cancel him. Rittenhouse had enrolled in an online ASU course in October; following his acquittal of all charges earlier this month, Rittenhouse announced that he hoped to enroll fully at ASU. Arizona Daily Independent listed all the groups involved in the campaign against Rittenhouse: Students for Socialism, Movimiento Estudiantil Chicanx de Aztlán (MEChA), Students for Justice in Palestine, and the Multicultural Solidarity Coalition (MSC).
The student organizations accused Rittenhouse of “white supremacy” and being a “racist murderer.” A jury determined otherwise. Several weeks ago, Rittenhouse was acquitted of multiple charges of homicide and reckless endangerment. Rittenhouse killed two of his assailants – Joseph Rosenbaum and Anthony Huber – and wounded a third, Gaige Grosskreutz. The trial revealed that the three men pursued and attacked Rittenhouse, who was in Kenosha to administer first aid and protect local businesses.
The student activist group petition to expel Rittenhouse also demanded that ASU reaffirm their support for the controversial multicultural center on campus by divesting funds from the ASU Police Department to fund the center and establishing an on-campus rape crisis hub called the Campus Assault Advocacy, Resources & Education (CAARE) Center.
Rosenbaum was a violent, convicted sex offender who served 10 years for multiple counts of child molestation. Huber was a convicted domestic abuser.
As AZ Free News reported, MSC leaders were behind the incident in September in which they demanded two of their peers leave a room on campus for being white males who were displaying “racist” messaging, such as a “Police Lives Matter” sticker. The room wasn’t designated officially as a multicultural room at the time of the incident.
Earlier this month, ASU determined that the three women involved – Sarra Tekola, Miriam “Mimi” Arraya, and Mastaani Qureshi – violated the university’s Code of Conduct.
Tekola and Arraya are prominent leaders within the Phoenix Metro chapter of Black Lives Matter (BLM). Tekola co-founded the chapter, and Arraya served as a policy minister. The pair’s BLM chapter has come to the defense of the three women for harassing and discriminating against their peers. They hosted a press conference earlier this month, and called for the public to contact ASU officials to drop the Code of Conduct charges against the three women.
The ASU student behind the petition is Taskina Bhuiyan, a sophomore studying microbiology. Bhuiyan’s petition characterized Rosenbaum, Huber, and Grosskreutz as “victims.” As of press time, the petition has over 1,200 signatures.
According to Bhuiyan’s LinkedIn, she worked for Living United for Change in Arizona (LUCHA) from 2018 to 2020 – the controversial activist organization that followed Senator Kyrsten Sinema into the bathroom over her hesitation to support the infrastructure bill. ASU Police recommended misdemeanor charges be filed against the activists. Bhuiyan’s name also appears on the staff page for the Islamic Community Center of Tempe, a mosque.
Demands for Rittenhouse’s expulsion came after ASU College Republicans United (CRU) announced that they were fundraising for lawsuits Rittenhouse may file against the media, if any. Previously, ASU CRU raised $14,000 for Rittenhouse’s legal defense for his trial.
CRU denounced efforts to cancel Rittenhouse, insisting that ASU should suspend the organizations and individuals involved for engaging in a “harassment campaign.”
The three young activist students at Arizona State University (ASU) who verbally accosted and harassed two peers for being white, cisgender males in “their” multicultural space may face disciplinary action for violating ASU’s Code of Conduct.
Mastaani Qureshi, Sarra Tekola, and Miriam “Mimi” Araya were identified as the women verbally accosting their peers. AZ Free News discovered that, at the time of the incident, the space hadn’t been officially established as a multicultural center – something that the three women attested to in a subsequent interview and statement about the incident.
According to reporting from State Press, Qureshi, Tekola, and Araya did violate ASU’s Code of Conduct. Specifics of those charges were revealed in an email obtained by Campus Reform – the three female students were charged with violating two policies related to disruption and stalking or harassing:
· 5-308 F-11: Interfering with or disrupting university or university-sponsored activities, including but not limited to classroom related activities, studying, teaching, research, intellectual or creative endeavor, administration, service or the provision of communication, computing or emergency services.
· 5-308 F-20: Stalking or engaging in repeated or significant behavior toward another individual, whether in person, in writing, or through electronic means, after having been asked to stop, or doing so to such a degree that a reasonable person, subject to such contact, would regard the contact as unwanted.
Additionally, one of the students (likely Tekola, because she was the only one of the three students arrested in relation to 2020 protests) was charged with an additional Code of Conduct violation:
· 5-308 F-26: Commission of any offense prohibited by state or federal law or local ordinance.
That email relaying the specific charges came from religious studies associate professor Leah Sarat. She urged her colleagues to sign an internal letter asking ASU to drop the Code of Conduct charges because they affected “one of their own.” Sarat was likely referring to Qureshi, a history and justice studies undergraduate, who also served as the alum liaison for the leadership sorority Omega Phi Alpha and co-president of ASU’s Women’s Coalition.
Both Araya and Tekola were graduate students. Araya, a Black Lives Matter (BLM) Phoenix policy minister, served as vice president of ASU’s Black Graduate Student Association, and was working toward her doctorate in justice studies in the School of Social Transformation. Tekola was the co-minister of activism for Black Lives Matter (BLM) Phoenix Metro and a PhD Candidate in ASU’s School of Sustainability.
In the request letter, Sarat also accused the two male students of promoting systemic racism for their attire and lunch choices. The two male students were, according to Sarat, “racist” for displaying a “Did Not Vote For Biden” t-shirt, Chik-fil-A cups, and a “Police Lives Matter” sticker.
“We consider it shameful and cruel that instead of protecting students who are clearly vulnerable and being targeted, the university is siding with white natoinalist media and downplaying the incident as an isolated disagreement between students,” asserted Sarat. “To be clear, this is a moment when colorblind language and emphasis on equivalence actually fosters systemic inequality by targeting and disciplining BIPOC students.”
Qureshi, Tekola, and Araya are reportedly being represented by The People’s Law Firm.
The ASU Dean of Students may determine sanctions for Code of Conduct violations. If a disciplinary sanction is imposed, the students may appeal for a hearing before a University Hearing Board. Based on the board’s assessment, the Senior Vice President for Educational Outreach and Student Services will then make a final decision on sanctions.
Corinne Murdock is a reporter for AZ Free News. Follow her latest on Twitter, or email tips to corinne@azfreenews.com.
