Teen Vogue, McCammond part ways after resurfaced anti-Asian tweets

The newly named editor-in-chief of Teen Vogue, Alexi McCammond, announced Thursday she was leaving the magazine after racist tweets she sent as a high school student in 2011 resurfaced and caused a staff rebellion at the Condé Nast title.

“My past tweets have overshadowed the work I’ve done to highlight the people and issues that I care about — issues that Teen Vogue has worked tirelessly to share with the world — and so Condé Nast and I have decided to part ways,” McCammond, 27, said in a statement posted to Twitter.

In a prepared statement about the move, Stan Duncan, Condé Nast’s chief people officer, also described McCammond’s departure as a parting of the ways after a failed attempt to make McCammond’s hire work.

“Given her previous acknowledgment of these posts and her sincere apologies, in addition to her remarkable work in journalism elevating the voices of marginalized communities, we were looking forward to welcoming her into our community,” Duncan said in the statement.

“We were dedicated to making her successful in this role and spent time working with her, our company leadership and the Teen Vogue team to find the best path forward. To that end, after speaking with Alexi this morning, we agreed that it was best to part ways, so as to not overshadow the important work happening at Teen Vogue,” he added.

Teen Vogue had only just hired McCammond on March 5, and she was to start as editor-in-chief on March 24. 

However, on March 8, Teen Vogue’s senior political editor, Allegra Kirkland, posted a note to Twitter stating that some 20 members of the magazine’s staff had contacted management at the magazine with concerns over McCammond’s past “racist and homophobic tweets.”

“In a moment of historically high anti-Asian violence and amid the on-going struggles of the LGBTQ community, we as the staff of Teen Vogue fully reject those sentiments,” the note stated.

Not long after that, McCammond emailed the staff at Teen Vogue, apologizing for the posts and saying they didn’t represent her personal values. 

“You’ve seen some offensive, idiotic tweets from when I was a teenager that perpetuated harmful and racist stereotypes about Asian Americans,” she said in the statement, which was shared with The Washington Post. 

In those tweets, originally posted in 2011 when she was a student, McCammond said she was “googling how to not wake up with swollen, Asian eyes” and referred to a teacher’s assistant as a “stupid Asian.”  

McCammond’s departure from Teen Vogue comes amid a rise in anti-Asian violence in the U.S., including a mass shooting on Tuesday, during which a gunman killed eight people in attacks at several Atlanta-area massage parlors. Six of the victims were Asian women.