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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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.
The city of Phoenix set aside $2.8 million for its new Heat Response and Mitigation Office, an initiative to reduce temperatures in the metro area. The city set aside the exact same amount to address its homeless population and offer affordable housing in this year’s budget, as well as similar amounts for various community building enterprises and administrative accountability.
On Monday, Phoenix Mayor Kate Gallego appeared on PBS’s Arizona Horizonto discuss the city’s Heat Response and Mitigation Office, a newly-launched local government sector to tackle dangers posed by urban heat, a phenomenon in which urbanization causes higher temperatures. Gallego explained that a major complaint from her constituents concerned the extreme temperatures in cities within the valley.
“When you’re mayor in the summer people are like, ‘When are you going to do something about the heat?’ And all my colleagues [in] city council got that [question] as well, so now we’re finally doing something,” said Gallego.
Gallego also mentioned the urban heat mitigation efforts would assist the most vulnerable, likely alluding to the homeless populations. Phoenix has an estimated 7,500 homeless people. According to the latest U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) report on homelessness published in January, however, Arizona has nearly 11,000 homeless people. HUD also reported that between 2019 and 2020, Arizona experienced one of the largest increases in the homeless population.
Leading Phoenix’s new Heat Response and Mitigation Office will be Arizona State University (ASU) Associate Professor David Hondula. Hondula teaches in the same School of Sustainability that was attended by Sarra Tekola, the PhD student who targeted and harassed two white male students over occupation of a multicultural center last month.
In the Arizona Horizon interview, Hondula explained that inner cities experience higher temperatures than the surrounding areas.
“The urban heat island is a process that leads to temperatures in the center of cities being higher than in the surrounding areas because of the way we build our cities and the types of activities that are concentrated in them, like driving lots of vehicles and operating lots of air conditioners,” explained Hondula.
Gallego explained that several pilot programs preceded the Heat Response and Mitigation Office, such as an initiative to introduce lighter-colored pavements.
According to the mayor, initiatives will include the addition of vegetation into the city, modifying building codes to allow for more sustainable and heat-resistant materials, and even redesigning the city to make it more heat-resistant.
Hondula expressed hope that they could create a cooler metro area, even with climate change.
Arizona summers reach regular highs between 110 to 120 degrees. The hottest day in recent history occurred on June 26, 1990, when temperatures reached 122 degrees.
Corinne Murdock is a reporter for AZ Free News. Follow her latest on Twitter, or email tips to corinne@azfreenews.com.
About two weeks ago, an incident occurred on Arizona State University’s (ASU) Tempe campus in which a group of activist students drove two students out of a study room. The two students happened to be displaying gear that could be construed as more conservative or Republican: a Bass Pro hat, a “Police Lives Matter” sticker, a Chick-fil-A cup, and a “Did Not Vote for Biden” t-shirt. Behind the camera were the activist students – members of the Multicultural Solidarity Coalition (MSC), a group that had been advocating for a multicultural space for years – who essentially wanted to maintain a “safe space” for people of color which they called their “multicultural center.”
AZ Free News looked further into this incident. We discovered several key facts: for one, the “multicultural center” wasn’t established officially at the time of the incident. This was discoverable in subsequent statements and interviews from MSC members involved in the incident.
Additionally, AZ Free News learned that there are several inconsistencies with one of the key activists behind the viral video: graduate student Sarra Tekola.
Multicultural Center Wasn’t Established Officially
In an interview with Civic Cipher about a week after the incident, Tekola asserted multiple times that the two male students “didn’t know what the space was.”
Two of the other female students involved in the incident were also interviewed: Mastaani Qureshi, a history and justice studies undergraduate, alum liaison for the leadership sorority Omega Phi Alpha and co-president of ASU’s Women’s Coalition; and Miriam “Mimi” Araya, a Black Lives Matter (BLM) Phoenix policy minister, vice president of ASU’s Black Graduate Student Association, and doctoral student in justice studies in the School of Social Transformation. The pair concurred with Tekola’s assessment that the two students didn’t know they were in a place designated as a multicultural center.
Tekola also admitted that there were no official staff members, rules, aesthetics, or formal governance associated with the space. She blamed ASU officials for not properly outfitting and identifying the space as a multicultural center.
“This space only just opened up at the beginning of September,” said Tekola. “At that point, [I] became aware [that these students] must’ve not even known what this space is – that’s on ASU, that’s not on them. […] So these students didn’t know what the space was.”
Tekola and her activist group, the Multicultural Solidarity Coalition (MSC) said in their official statement in response to the incident that the multicultural center hadn’t been fully launched.
“We have been working toward this goal [to establish a multicultural center] since 2016 and, as of 2020, we have been coordinating with ASU administrators to establish a multicultural center. The multicultural center is currently housed in one room on campus that was opened this semester and has not yet been fully launched,” wrote MSC. (emphasis added)
Yet, Tekola’s characterization that the space opened up at the beginning of September appears to carry its own inconsistencies. ASU’s newspaper, The State Press, indicated in a September 11 article that the center hadn’t launched. They reported that no further updates were provided in a meeting on the center and other social justice initiatives the day before, though Senior Vice President for Educational Outreach and Student Services James Rund had told the paper in August that the center would be running at some point that semester.
Tekola conflicting herself isn’t out of character for the PhD candidate. It appears that she, Qureshi, and Araya told Civic Cipher that they’d foregone “opportunities to respond via other media outlets.” However, Tekola interviewed with The Arizona Republic on or prior to September 29.
Inconsistencies of that caliber are more frequent than not in Tekola’s life.
Tekola Goes By Multiple Versions of Her Name
This PhD candidate has multiple variations of her first and last name. AZ Free News has found the following name variations associated with this individual: her first name has been cited as Zarra, Sarra, or Zahara, and her last name has been either Teacola or Tekola. At times, Tekola has dropped her last name and gone by “Zarra” only.
According to ASU, her graduate school profile knew her as “Sarra Tekola.” That profile was last archived on Friday. By Monday, the page was removed.
Tekola’s Instagram profile used to be @zebratekola, but she made it private after the incident. Tekola even attempted to claim it wasn’t her, despite screenshots of her original profile and a shoutout linking to her profile from “Scary Movie” film series actress Regina Hall.
Now, Tekola has another Instagram profile called @sarratekola, likely created on Monday judging by the first post on the page. As of press time, her Twitter profile is still active, though it’s now private – @zebra425.
Finally, on her Facebook profile page, @zahara.teacola, and a GoFundMe for her arrest connected with multiple BLM protests, Tekola refers to herself as “Zahara Teacola.” The latest public post on that page occurred April 22, 2020, where she reposted something that’s since been removed claiming that the Kardashians were in blackface. Tekola asked if people decided that the Kardashians’ alleged blackface was okay because they “sleep with black men.”
At times, Tekola has opted to not give her name at all. In May, BLM Phoenix posted an interview of Tekola discussing her arrest last October for obstruction of a public thoroughfare and tampering with physical evidence (CR2020-130075). Those charges were later dismissed without prejudice.
Claims She’s a First-Generation College Student, and Father Was a ‘Climate Change Refugee’
Tekola has claimed repeatedly that she is a first-generation college student, and that her father was a “climate change refugee.” She claims that latter assertion inspires much of her work.
However, as first reported by the Arizona Daily Independent, Tekola is the daughter of Ethiopian refugee Fasil and Susan Tekola. Fasil attended an Ethiopian college prior to fleeing the violent communist revolution of the ’70s. Up until around 2016, Susan was a registered nurse and union member that advocated for socialized medicine. According to the Washington Department of Health, Susan had her credentials suspended in 2016 for “neglecting to respond to charges of being unable to practice with reasonable skill and safety due to concerns related to mental health issues.”
Susan wasn’t Fasil’s first wife – he told The Grist that he married an American woman named Debby to gain citizenship. Prior to their marriage, Debby was an English teacher that he’d met in Kenya and began dating.
The history of Tekola’s parents challenges her previous claims that she is a first-generation college student. Fasil had attended university while in Kenya. It’s likely Susan attended even more college: the state of Washington currently has required all registered nurses to have a bachelor’s degree.
Fasil also wasn’t a “climate refugee” as Tekola has claimed repeatedly. According to The Grist, he fled the violence in Ethiopia, not the drought. Fasil first fled to Nairobi, Kenya, then Israel, then Greece, before reaching Sweden. There, the Swedish government denied Fasil’s asylum application, deporting him back to Kenya. While in Kenya, Fasil studied wildlife range management in college for a year, before taking a job with the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).
Before his world was thrown into turmoil, Fasil Tekola lived a comfortable life in Ethiopia’s capital city, Addis Ababa. Born into a wealthy family, his father a colonel, he was one of only a few kids who drove their own cars to school.
The communists rounded up Fasil Fasil and “men of all ages, targeting the educated and wealthy, and gunned them down. Known today as the Red Terror, the genocide claimed more than 10,000 lives in Addis Ababa alone.
Tekola was 19 years old. He and other students were rounded up and jailed. But because his father was a well-known community leader and had left the military in the years preceding the war, he was later released. Two of his friends were not so lucky. After hearing about their murders, Tekola and a friend decided to flee the country.
Their escape began a journey that would send Tekola bouncing across the world in search of asylum. After years of traveling, he’d end up literally a half a world away in Seattle.
Tekola is also far from a victim of oppressive systems and circumstances, claims under which she’s aligned herself in her activism. The PhD candidate grew up in Maple Valley, Washington. According to census information, the median value of a house there from 2015 to 2019 was over $414,000, while median income in 2019 sat over $57,000. As Arizona Daily Independent noted, the median income in Tempe, Arizona, is just over $30,200.
Tekola also claimed in a poem she wrote that she was homeschooled growing up, but said her mother felt she was too naive about the “real world.” Due to that belief, Tekola recounted, her mother placed her in a private Christian school. Tekola said her main contentions with the school were the uniforms, authority figures, mean girls, and how easy the schoolwork was, so her parents put her in a public school.
Here’s what else we could discover about Tekola:
PhD Dissertation Proposes Decolonization as a Climate Change Solution
Tekola’s PhD dissertation suggests that decolonization is a solution for climate change, according to her profile on Academia.
“[Tekola’s] dissertation works on the social side of climate change focusing on creating the cultural change Western society needs to successfully implement climate solutions,” read the profile. “She is investigating the connections between climate change and colonization, and how the colonial trauma Western countries have affects our ability to address climate change today and what we can do to change this dynamic.”
Tekol further suggested on her profile with Happy Lab ASU, a collaborative project of ASU School of Sustainability Students, that the dissolution of Western society would solve climate change:
“My dissertation research focuses on identifying the social causes of climate change as affected by colonization.Specifically, I consider how the colonial mentality still prevalent in Western society, which promotes individualism, consumerism, egotism and hegemony, prevents us from the just transition required to address climate change. I am conducting action research, seeing what happens when Western consumers build relationships of solidarity with the people directly affected by their consumption. Right now we are working with the Black Mesa community who is being displaced from their traditional lands due to coal that is used to pump water to our city. My work is about creating the cultural change needed to successfully implement climate solutions, experimenting with decolonization as a climate solution.”
ASU couldn’t confirm or deny whether Tekola would be finishing her PhD candidacy due to the privacy rights of students, according to ASU spokesman Jerry Gonzalez.
Co-Founded Black Lives Matter Phoenix, Admitted as Ford Foundation Fellow
Tekola co-founded the Phoenix chapter of BLM, and serves as the “co-minister of activism.” Like most of the other BLM protests in the wake of George Floyd’s death, peaceful BLM protests in Phoenix devolved into violence and looting last May. An estimated millions in damage resulted from rioters descending on Scottsdale Fashion Square. BLM Phoenix issued a statement after the riots that they were not involved.
In the past, Tekola’s activism has included her work as an advisor for the Hive Fund, a climate change and gender justice activist organization; a board member for the Rowan Institute, a climate change activist organization; and a director for the Reclaiming STEM Institute, an advocacy organization for diversity in scientific leadership and policy.
Tekola was also the co-founder of Women of Color Speak Out, a group focused on making environmental activism accessible to people of color. That group lasted from 2015 to 2019. According to a pop-up notice that appears on the homepage, the activists parted ways due to ideological differences. None of the founders that AZ Free News contacted responded to our inquiries by press time.
Finally, Tekola was awarded the prestigious far-left Ford Foundation Fellowship in 2018 for a predoctoral expertise in “geography.” Factors considered for a predoctoral fellowship award include the applicant being a minority and focusing their studies or research on diversity and underrepresented communities. The current award sits at $27,000 for three years, exclusive Ford Fellows conference access, and exclusive Ford Fellows networking opportunities.
At the time of press, ASU hasn’t issued any further statements about the incident, or whether any of the students involved will face any penalties.
Corinne Murdock is a reporter for AZ Free News. Follow her latest on Twitter, or email tips to corinne@azfreenews.com.
